Latin Art Core

Miami
United States

1646-48 SW 8th Street
Miami 33135 Miami
United States
Email : imoleiro@hotmail.com
URL : www.latinartcore.com/

About

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Fernando Botero

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Wifredo Lam La Cortina 1942

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About the Artist
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Fernando Botero is a renowned Colombian painter and sculptor known for his volumetric stylization of figures and objects. His oeuvre ranges in subject matter such as daily life in Colombia, art historical references like the Mona Lisa, and abuses of power—all unified by Botero’s exaggeratedly rotund figures. This stylization, known as "Boterismo", is often interpreted as a pointed social critique, as seen in his The Presidential Family (1967). “An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why,” he reflected. “You adopt a position intuitively, only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.” Born on April 19, 1932 in Medellín, Colombia, Botero grew up surrounded by Spanish colonial architecture as well as pre-Columbian artifacts. Initially schooled as a matador, the artist abandoned the profession after two years to pursue art. Traveling to Europe in the early 1950s, he copied works of Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez at the Prado Museum in Madrid and studied the paintings of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca in Italy. In 1960, the artist moved to New York where he experimented with the gestural brushstrokes of the New York School painters of the time. This stylistic dalliance was short lived and by the 1970s Botero had settled into the technique for which he is now known. The artist currently lives and works between Paris, France, New York, NY, and Tuscany, Italy. His works are presently held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museo Botero in Bogotá which is dedicated to the artist and his oeuvre.


Tempera on paper mounted on cardboard
42 x 33 in
COA by Eskil Lam

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The internationally renowned Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) was a precursor of a cross-cultural style of painting, infusing Western modernism with African and Caribbean symbolism. His peripatetic life brought him into contact with all the avant-garde movements of his times―cubism, surrealism, CoBrA―whose incentives for greater freedom in art, for unleashing the unconscious, and for exploring the “marvelous” through automatic writing had great impact on his work. But Lam never lost sight of the world around him and like his friend Aimé Césaire took on the struggle “to paint the drama of his country, the cause and spirit of the blacks.” He invented a highly original voice that speaks in the name of “defending human dignity” and “saluting freedom.”
In 2015 a retrospective exhibition of his works opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; this exhibition later travel to the Reina Sofia Museum in Spain and the Tate Museum in London afterward.