Fernando Botero’s New York Years Take Center Stage at Sotheby’s Breuer Headquarters
A new exhibition at Sotheby’s is returning Fernando Botero to the city that helped define his visual language. “Botero in New York,” organized with the Botero family, opens July 22 and runs through September 7 at Sotheby’s New York, 945 Madison Ave. It is the first single-artist exhibition ever mounted at the firm’s Breuer headquarters, and it gathers more than 20 rarely seen paintings and sculptures, many of them shown in New York for the first time.
The presentation focuses on the years Botero spent in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was absorbing the city’s competing artistic currents while developing the style that would become known as “Boterismo.” In New York, the Colombian artist Fernando Botero (1932–2023) was living among Beat poets and abstract painters, but he continued to pursue figuration at a moment when abstraction still dominated the conversation. That decision, Sotheby’s global head of Latin American art Anna Di Stasi said, was not a retreat from modernism but a different route into it.
The exhibition includes early works that chart that evolution, among them “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve” and “Apotheosis of Ramón Hoyos,” alongside later paintings such as “Sunflowers,” “Still Life with Watermelon,” and “Picnic.” The last of those is making its public debut. Set in a wooded clearing, it quietly nods to Édouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” while shifting the scene into Botero’s own world of rounded bodies, measured space, and social observation.
Botero’s New York story also includes a pivotal encounter with Dorothy Miller, the first professional curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1961, Miller visited another artist in Botero’s building and left with “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,” a purchase that helped widen his visibility in the city. His circle soon expanded to include Claude Bernard, Ernst Beyeler, and Pierre Levai of Marlborough Gallery. By 1972, his debut exhibition at Marlborough had sold out.
The market has only deepened since his death in 2023. According to the Artnet Price Database, auction sales of Botero’s work reached $53.8 million in 2024, and his auction record was set that same year at Christie’s, where “The Musicians” sold for $5.1 million. The numbers underscore what the exhibition makes visible: Botero’s New York years were not a footnote, but the crucible in which his most recognizable language took shape.
