Fernando Botero valuation
Inflated every figure, fruit and horse he painted, and said he was painting volume, not fat.
Fernando Botero was born in Medellín in 1932, was sent to a school for matadors as a boy, and had his first exhibition in Bogotá in 1951.
What a work by Fernando Botero is worth
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Bio
Fernando Botero was born in Medellín in 1932, was sent to a school for matadors as a boy, and had his first exhibition in Bogotá in 1951. He studied in Madrid and Florence, where the Italian Renaissance painters, Piero della Francesca above all, set the course of his work, and around 1956 he arrived at the swollen, rounded forms that became his signature. He painted Colombian life, bishops, generals, brothels, still lifes and versions of Velázquez and Rubens, and from the 1970s made monumental bronzes. Later series dealt with Colombia's drug violence and, in 2005, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He died in Monaco in 2023.
The market spans unique oils on canvas, a very large body of drawings and watercolours, and bronzes in small editions, usually of six with artist's proofs, at sizes from tabletop to monumental. For a bronze the cast number, foundry mark and size identify the work, and the same model at two sizes is two quite different propositions. Botero is extensively forged, in both paintings and sculpture, so a documented exhibition history or gallery provenance matters a great deal.
The Salón, the Museum of Modern Art and the Plaza Botero
In 1958 Botero won first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos, and in 1961 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought his Mona Lisa, Age Twelve. In 1992 his monumental bronzes were shown along the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
In 2000 he gave his own collection to found the Museo Botero in Bogotá and gave works to the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, whose square, the Plaza Botero, holds 23 of his sculptures.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
