In the center of the art of Hôtel de Caumont in French Aix-en-Provence the exhibition “Botero: dialogue with Picasso” was opened. For the Hispanic, Fernando Botero is a retrospective, where Picasso acts as one of the main sources of inspiration.
An epigraph to the exhibition is the saying of Botero about Picasso, in which an artist from Columbia praises the great Catalan as a consistent in his work as a master and a man who was not afraid to take risks. Curators have chosen it not casually, in fact practically the same can be said about Botero himself, who once started drawing swollen, like boiled sausage, human bodies and took on this bank.
Fernando Botero was born in 1932 in a small town in Colombia. At the age of sixteen he began to work as an illustrator, and at twenty already his first solo exhibition in Bogota was held. At the same time, he became interested in the works of Picasso, “a rich palette, monumentality and sensuality of forms,” as he wrote in his diaries, as well as “the nonconformism of the Spaniard.” It was under the influence of Picasso’s distorted forms and his subjective view of reality that Botero’s artistic language, first recognized by the Latin American community, and also in Spain and Portugal, and then all over the world, was formed. Today, as aerated sculptures Botero adorn the squares of many cities in the world – from Tel Aviv to New York, and the paintings are kept in many museums around the world.
At the exhibition in Aix-en-Provence, more than sixty canvases of different years and more than twenty works by Picasso from his Parisian and Barcelona museums were collected. Parallels in their work are conducted thematically – in portraits and self-portraits, the influence of old masters, the world of circus, music and dance.
The event takes place from 24.11.2017 to 11.03.2018 at the Hôtel de Caumont in Aix-en-Provence