Fernando Botero, one of the most known Colombian artists, was born in Medellin in 1932. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando of Madrid, Spain. During the ’60s, and thanks to the support of art critics such as Marta Traba, he became famous. His artistic training also was completed thanks to his artistic exchanges in cities like New York and Mexico City. In these towns, he came in contact with the European and American avant-garde. Thanks to these networks, Botero became familiar with abstract expressionism, an artistic movement native to New York that had fundamental features of the work with large formats and a new understanding of the form and their work on the canvas’ surface. These components can be seen in many of his paintings and drawings. Becoming in this way, his characteristic artistic signature.

His artwork has been characterized by the iconographic reinterpretation of some of the most known artworks from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. This artistic gesture can be seen in the change in the use of the perspective, the figure’s dimensionality, the use of color, and the exaggeration in the representation of the bodies, the objects, and the landscapes. Thanks to these aesthetic practices, Botero establish his interpretation of some colonial cultural practices that survive in Colombian society. This particular plastic language is a tool for social and political criticism of Colombian reality during the XXth century.