Fernando Botero Angulo, the youngest of three brothers, was born in Medellin, Colombia on the 19th April 1932. Now, aged 79 years and currently living in Paris, Botero is regarded as the highest-paid living artist originally from Latin America.
His major works include figurative painting, drawings and sculptures of voluminous shapes and dimensions. Although his major works include portraits, bullfighting and equestrian scenes, as well as nudes and still lifes, this article will focus on the Abu Ghraib series and the death of Pablo Escobar painting.
Abu Ghraib series (2005 Exhibition)
A total of more than 85 paintings and 100 drawings were produced by Botero to express his anger of the shocking treatment and abuses suffered by the detainees at Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq) during the Iraq War. Many figures have the typical rounded shape characteristic of his work but others look more like body-builders.
His work was inspired by the photographs and the United States Army report released in 2004 (although the written descriptions of the abuses inspired him more than photographs). The US Army's sadistic games that horrified the world and provoked expressions of concern and disgust among the general population included using dogs to make juveniles, some as young as 15 years old to urinate on themselves as part of a competition.
Botero's painting depicts very graphically the abuses and show men blindfolded and dressed in women's underwear; men being beaten by the army, bleeding men and women in humiliating positions with underwear on their faces; there are also naked prisoners in a human pyramid and an officer urinating on two Iraqis, one of them blindfolded; some of the drawings are too shocking to describe, however they represent a reality that occurred in Abu Ghraib
The death of Pablo Escobar
Pablo Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian drug dealer native of Antioquia (same region as Fernando Botero); regarded as the richest and most successful criminal in world history; he was shot and killed in a gun battle on the rooftop of his safe house after escaping through a top floor window on the 2nd December of 1993.
Fernando Botero decided to paint his death as part of a series of paintings to reflect a simple testimony to a reality that was happening in Colombia during the 1990s; it is not intended to have a political statement but to express his disappointment and anger on the bloodshed caused by Colombia's persistent violence and its widespread drug trade.
Fernando Botero's comments about the painting "There were no photographers around the day Pablo Escobar died. But I can paint a painting that shows how I imagine his death unfolded. He was half-naked, barefoot, on a rooftop with a gun in his hand. The image is a synthesis of what occurred, and it has the power to stay in your memory, because it's an image that's been carefully composed and polished, so it goes straight to the brain"
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