The Big, Fat Art of Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero, one of the most successful artists alive, returned to London after 25 years. In March he presented the BBC’s award-winning documentary “The Big, Fat Art of Fernando Botero”.

The screening was followed by a Q&A session with the film’s director Richard Collings and the artist.

Synopsis of the documentary

Steve Smith accompanies the acclaimed Colombian painter and sculptor on a trip to his homeland where he must now be escorted by armed guards after several kidnap attempts. Upon his return, he is stunned to discover that his politician son is facing imprisonment following allegations of corruption. Director: Richard Collings (UK), 2007, 58 mins, in English.

More about Fernando Botero

Born on 19th April 1932, Botero started to work as an illustrator on the newspaper El Colombiano, in 1948. That same year he first showed his work at an exhibition of painters from the Antioquia region. Today, Botero divides his time between his studios in New York, Paris, Italy and Colombia. Since 1983 he has exhibited all over the world and his work is displayed in galleries throughout the US and Europe as well as his native South America. He is one of the most successful artists alive with paintings selling for millions.

The ageing Fernando Botero is returning to his troubled homeland, Colombia, where he was raised in the same city as the drug lord, Pablo Escobar who is the subject of one of Botero‘s most controversial paintings. His work includes still-lives and landscapes but the artist tends to primarily focus on situational portraiture. His paintings and sculptures are noted for their exaggerated proportions and the corpulence of the human and animal figures. Botero explains his use of obese figures and forms thus:

"An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later you do attempt to rationalize or even justify it."

He is an abstract artist in the most fundamental sense of the word, choosing what colors, shapes, and proportions to use based on intuitive aesthetic thinking. His works are informed by a Colombian upbringing and social commentary is woven throughout his work.

His canvasses include:

• Rubens and His Wife (1965)
• Self Portrait in the Style of Velázquez (1986)
• La Pica (1984)
• El Quite (1988)
• Dead Archbishops (1965)
• Dictator Drinking Hot Chocolate (1969)
• Families with Colombian Animals (1970)
• Dead of Ramón Torres (1986)

Produced in bronze, marble and melted resin, some of his notable sculptures are:

• Venus (1977)
• Dog, (1981)
• Roman Soldier (1986)
• Woman on Horseback (1991)
  

He has just produced his most talked-about pieces in years, a series of sketches and paintings provoked by the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

More about Richard Collings

Richard Collings has produced and directed a number of short films. He was the BBC‘s South America Correspondent for two years, covering the dramatic hostage crisis in Peru; General Pinochet‘s last days as head of the army in Chile; and the ups and downs of Colombia‘s civil war. Over the past year he has worked for BBC’s Newsnight - the flagship news and current affairs programme. The doc about Botero and his art was a project that took ten years to get made and nearly didn‘t happen at all! To date the film has been shortlisted for two highly coveted awards: it was part of the Judges‘ Official Selection for the Orlando Florida Film Festival 2007 and was nominated for the UK‘s prestigious Grierson Documentary Awards.