The Baroque World of Fernando Botero

March 15, 2008 – June 8, 2008

Fernando Botero (b. 1932) is one of the most internationally popular artists working today. Using a broad range of media, the Colombian-born Botero has created a world of his own, one that is at once accessible and enigmatic.

Botero is renowned for his extravagantly rounded figures combining the polish and excess of Spanish colonial baroque with the social realism of the Mexican muralists. Their humorous exaggeration belies the more serious content of Botero’s work—commentary on colonialism, political instability in Latin America, and the vernacular artistic traditions of the region, as well as European art history.

Fernando Botero (b. 1932) The Orchestra, 2001 Oil on canvas, 80 x 56 ¾ inches Private Collection		Fernando Botero (b. 1932) After Velasquez, 2005 Oil on canvas, 79 x 67 inches Private Collection		Fernando Botero (b. 1932) Dancer at the Barre, 2001 Oil on canvas, 64 ½ x 45 ½ inches Private Collection

The Baroque World of Fernando Botero is a major retrospective exhibition featuring 100 paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Drawn from Botero’s private collection and assembled over the past 50 years, this exhibition includes favorite works that the artist was unable to part with, as well as pieces reacquired years after they left his possession. Many have never before been exhibited in public.

This exhibition goes beyond the Delaware Art Museum’s galleries, as three of Botero’s sculptures are mounted in the Museum’s Copeland Sculpture Garden.

The Baroque World of Fernando Botero is organized and circulated by
Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia.

Sponsors This exhibition is presented in Delaware by     The Delaware Art Museum received a MetLife Foundation Museum and Community Connections grant to support exhibition-related programming. This exhibition is made possible, in part, by grants from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.