Eight monumental statues, imposing and iconic creations by Fernando Botero, strategically located in some of the city's historic squares, from the Palladian terrace of the Pincio to Piazza del Popolo, to Piazza Mignanelli next to the central and super celebrated Piazza di Spagna. And now in Piazza Venezia, in Palazzo Bonaparte which was the residence of Letizia Remolino, Napoleon's mother, the most important exhibition ever held in Italy dedicated to the great artist who died in Monaco a year ago but was buried in his Pietrasanta.
Rome celebrates 60 years of Botero's artistic career
Rome pays homage in grand style to this extraordinary artist with this exhibition, which thanks to Lina Botero, the artist's daughter, and Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz, a great expert on his work who curated the exhibition in partnership with the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro Internazionale, recounts over 60 years of the Maestro's artistic career: over 120 works including paintings, watercolors, sanguines, charcoals, sculptures and some extraordinary unpublished works, exceptionally lent only for this exhibition, reconstruct Botero's entire artistic career in its many facets. Large-scale works that represent the sumptuous roundness of Botero's style, rendered with three-dimensional effects and bright and vibrant colors, a world of soft and voluminous figures of characters with impassive expressions and enigmatic looks that explore a wide range of themes, including human nature, contemporary society and Latin American culture in a unique combination of humor, irony, but also emotional depth. If his figures are often portrayed in relaxed and calm poses, in reality Botero, through the colour spread over large surfaces and his dilated volumes, improbably brings out the contrast between humour and tragedy, creating works that aim to provoke reflections on the topics covered.
The itinerary of the exhibition
The first section The exhibition is entitled Versions and documents Botero's love for the works of the great classical masters - as a young man at the Prado Museum in Madrid he had been a copyist of the works of Velasquez and Goya - for Durer, Van Eyck, Rubens, Ingres and Manet and then and above all for the great classics of the Italian Renaissance, from Raphael to Mantegna to Piero della Francesca, who throughout his career inspired him for some of his original works that have brought him the most fame in the world and which we find in this exhibition: La Menina (the maid of honor) which quotes Diego Velázquez, - a work never before exhibited to the public because it has always hung in Botero's Parisian studio - El dittico inspired by Piero della Francesca, El matrimonio Arnolfini, which takes up Jan Van Eyck or Mademoiselle Rivière inspired by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, or La fornarina, a quote from Raphael or El retrato de Los burgueses which takes up Rubens. It should be noted that a very important work never exhibited before appears in the exhibition: Homage to Mantegna from 1958., an extraordinary loan from a private collection in the United States and which after decades was recently discovered by Lina Botero through Christie's. We then continue with the Sculpture section which includes small-format works, and the Drawings section, which were fundamental for Botero, who loved to assert the importance of drawing as preparation and as a work in all respects. We return to painting in the fourth section with the Still Life, a theme that aroused great fascination in Botero when at the end of the twentieth century there were not many artists who still tried their hand at this theme "The theme is so unimportant - he declared - that it practically disappears. What counts, and what must be highlighted in a still life, is the specific and individual style of the artist and the creative ability to do something distinctive that lives inside a person and is shaped in the painting in function of a great emotion". The journey then continues with the pastels section.
This brings us to the seventh section dedicated to the circus. Botero began to deal with this theme in 2006 during a trip to Mexico where he discovered a circus that, although modest, boasted an authentic Latin American flavour. During the visit he was struck not only by the characters who showed a contained sadness but above all by the immense poetry and plasticity of its forms and colours. Even if in the works the circus actors, trapeze artists, clowns and contortionists appear in the midst of action, they reflect a serenity and an immobile equilibrium typical of Botero's characters and transfer to those who admire the work a paradoxical sensation that oscillates between dynamism and staticity in which colours contribute to spreading a sense of melancholy and poetic enchantment.
Directly related to the circus section is the next one that deals with the theme of bullfighting. Bullfighting, one of the passions of his life, has been an important theme in his pictorial work that returned intensely in the early 80s and that coincided with the most prolific periods of his career as an artist. The theme has been taken up repeatedly in oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, charcoal, pastels, sanguine and an infinite number of sketches in an irrepressible wave of energy and creativity.
Botero's art and the social themes in his works
But Botero's art, despite its abstraction, is also deeply imbued with humanity and attention to the civil and social issues of his time. This is demonstrated by the ninth section of the exhibition dedicated to the theme of violence. If art does not have the power to produce social or political changes, it does have the power to perpetuate the memory of an event over time. The world remembers the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War because Picasso painted it. The same happened with Goya and the execution of May 2. Art as a testimony to human tragedies that endures over time in the collective memory. And in this section we find a series of paintings that denounce the cruelty of torture perpetrated in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as well as the political and criminal violence that has plagued Colombia. And perhaps in the crude representation of these scenes we understand better than any other example that the dilated volumes of Botero's characters are anything but an abstraction from reality, but become a dilated mirror of evil.
"This - says Lina Botero – it is an exceptional exhibition because it is the first major exhibition of paintings dedicated to Fernando Botero after his death. It is also a different vision of his work, which highlights the mastery with which Botero worked with different techniques throughout his artistic career. It is an extraordinary opportunity to celebrate the first anniversary of my father's death in Italy, a country that meant a lot to him and his work”.
Fernando Botero – The great exhibition
Edited by Lina Botero and Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz Fisac
September 17, 2024 - January 19, 2025
Bonaparte Palace – Piazza Venezia 5 – Rome
Information 068715111
