![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://uknews.evprotec.com/fernando-botero-celebrated-colombian-artist-dies-aged-91/&media=https://uknews.evprotec.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/131102575_5137caa054d2d00a827fda888d73a68ad53449120_188_5760_32401000x563.jpg&description=Image source, Getty Images Image caption, Botero insisted he painted "volume" in his figures Colombian artist Fernando Botero, who gained worldwide fame with his sculptures and paintings of corpulent figures, has died at the age of 91. His works feature outsized people and animals. But Botero also tackled politics and other serious subjects. President Gustavo Petro called him "the painter of our traditions and defects, the painter of our virtues". The artist, who lived in Monaco, was suffering from pneumonia, his daughter Lina said on Friday. Local media hailed Botero as the greatest Colombian artist of all time. His hometown, Medellín, has declared a week of mourning. The son of a travelling salesman, Botero was born in 1932. In his 20s he travelled to Europe, where he discovered classical art before moving to the US in 1960. He exaggerated the size of his subjects, sometimes for comical effect or for parody. One of the most famous examples is his version of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa with a puffed-up face. Botero said he found it impossible to depict dainty creatures. He could take a thin needle as his subject, he said, but on canvas or in bronze it would be transformed into an object 10 times the size, bulging at the sides. His daughter once asked him to draw an animal for a piece of homework. "Ok, I will do it," he said in a 2008 BBC interview. "Then I started to be very careful, tried to be very careful, doing the horse and then suddenly it started to be Boteresque. And she said 'no, no, Papa, no, no Papa, you are spoiling the whole thing'." "You see already my brain is completely deformed, I cannot do it. Anything I do is Boteresque." Critics often derided the exaggerated size of his subjects. "If I paint a woman, a man, a dog or a horse, I always do with this idea of the volume," Botero told Spain's El Mundo newspaper in 2014. "I don't paint fat women," he went on. "What I do paint are volumes." Image source, Getty Images Image caption, Botero offered a mo){kind=link}
Colombian artist Fernando Botero, who gained worldwide fame with his sculptures and paintings of corpulent figures, has died at the age of 91.
His works feature outsized people and animals. But Botero also tackled politics and other serious subjects.
President Gustavo Petro called him “the painter of our traditions and defects, the painter of our virtues”.
The artist, who lived in Monaco, was suffering from pneumonia, his daughter Lina said on Friday.
Local media hailed Botero as the greatest Colombian artist of all time. His hometown, Medellín, has declared a week of mourning.