The Bank Austria Kunstforum Explores the Fernando Botero Phenomenon

Written by Kurt Messner Saturday, 11 February 2012 22:36

Vienna.- The Bank Austria Kunstforum is proud to host the first ever comprehensive presentation in Austria of the painted oeuvre by the Columbian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (b. 1932 in Medellín). "Botero", on view at the gallery until January 15th 2012, includes 70 paintings ranging from the late 1950s until today telescope a view for us into Botero’s artistic universe. The artist interprets his portraits, nudes and still life with allusions to his South American origins. They are pictures of seeming cheer and innocuousness, but at the same time are ambivalent and infused with dark, unfathomable cunning. Botero has been astonishing the world now for more than fifty years with his opulent, “blown up” figures, whose aesthetics as it were contradict the precise rendition of form and colour. Botero does nothing other than force art history to question its own canon. The exhibition includes the sensational Abu Ghraib Cycle of 2004/2005 and explores the “phenomenon of Botero”, which is today more topical than ever.

The exhibition is sectioned into various chapters: Everyday Life in South America, Catholicism, Bull Fight, or paraphrases of the most famous works in the history of art – images in which the sensuousness of life keeps colliding with its transience. “I am the most Columbian among Columbian artists,” says Fernando Botero. He makes us understand with incredible consistency what a picture has to achieve according to his ideas: an unambiguous message, a dialogue between artist and observer that is unequivocally understood. Botero’s subjects seem to come from another age and are full of melancholy and nostalgia. In this way Botero – exactly like contemporary South American literature and music – is placed entirely in the tradition of his home continent.


His figures have the effect of being captured in an anachronism: they exist unconcernedly, they eat, drink, play cards, go for walks, sew, weep, go on picnics; they always seem isolated, plunged into some world deep inside themselves. Botero moreover inserts metaphors of impending threat into his pictures – such as erupting volcanoes or collapsing buildings – which turn the seeming idyll upside down into the negative. The reproach, also repeatedly made by art critics, that Botero deals only with cosy and “appetising” motifs, is not true by any stretch of the imagination, as is proven above all in his Abu Ghraib Cycle. Here the artist wants to bear emotional witness to the shame that rises when watching the terrible scenes of torture perpetrated by US American soldiers. With this cycle Botero brought political events of everyday into his art.

Fernando Botero was born the second of three children in Medellín, in the mountains of Colombia. His parents were David Botero and Flora Angulo. David Botero, a salesman who traveled by horseback, died when the boy was age four, and his mother worked as a seamstress. An uncle took a major role in his life. Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other cultural institutes, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches and then the rich life of the city. In 1944, after Botero attended a Jesuit school, Botero's uncle sent him to a school for matadors for two years. In 1948, at the age of 16, Botero published his first illustrations in the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano daily paper. He used the money he was paid to attend high school at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia. His first solo show was held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival. In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists to Barcelona, where he stayed briefly before moving on to Madrid. In Madrid, Botero studied at the Academia de San Fernando. In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had a solo exhibit at the Leo Matiz gallery. Later that year, he won the ninth edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos.


In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre, studying the works there. He lived in Florence, Italy from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters. In recent decades, he has lived most of the time in Paris, but spends one month a year in his native city of Medellín. He has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work commands selling prices in the millions of dollars. While his work includes still-lifes and landscapes, Botero has concentrated on situational portraiture. His paintings and sculptures are united by their proportionally exaggerated, or "fat" figures, as he once referred to them. Botero is an abstract artist in the most fundamental sense, choosing colors, shapes, and proportions based on intuitive aesthetic thinking. Though he spends only one month a year in Colombia, he considers himself the "most Colombian artist living" due to his insulation from the international trends of the art world.

In 1980, with the support and backing of the popular Viennese actor Heinz Conrad, the first exhibitions were organised in the former banking hall of the Österreichische Creditanstalt für Handel und Gewerbe (Austrian Bank of Trade and Commerce), premises built in 1914, which was then standing empty. The curtain-raiser was a comprehensive show on Austria’s cultural and intellectual history from 1880 to 1980: “Aufbruch in die Moderne” (Starting out into the Modern Age), curated by Rupert Feuchtmüller and organised by Ivo Stanek, which attracted 28,000 visitors. Subsequent exhibitions, such as “Fotografis” – a presentation of the superlative photograph collection of the Länderbank, as it was then called – also proved to be great attractions for the public. The success of these exhibitions was as surprising as it was overwhelming, so that the director of the Länderbank and later Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky initiated a resolution to set up a permanent exhibition venue oriented on international standards – the Länderbank Kunstforum was born, and the present director of the Albertina, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, was its first director. In 1988, the Austrian star architect Gustav Peichl was commissioned to design the first reconstruction of the Kunstforum, making it the most modern exhibition building in Austria at the time.


The re-opening was in March 1989 with “Egon Schiele und seine Zeit” (Egon Schiele and his Time). This exhibition attracted 186,000 visitors and was successful not only in Vienna; it created a sensation on tour in London, Munich and Wuppertal. The Schiele exhibition in the Kunstforum was the first major debut of the then little known Leopold Collection; it thus functioned as a booster for the Austrian Republic to purchase the collection and set up the present-day Leopoldmuseum. Since then, the objective of the Kunstforum has been very clearly defined: the presentation of international top exhibitions on classical modern art and its forerunners: Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, J. M. W. Turner, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, Tamara de Lempicka and many more. Visit the gallery's website at  ... http://www.bankaustria-kunstforum.at

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~