Sotheby’s to Mount Exhibition of Rarely Seen Fernando Botero Works

Sotheby’s will open an exhibition dedicated to the work of Fernando Botero later this month in partnership with the artist’s foundation.

On view July 22 to September 7, “Botero in New York” will feature rarely seen works by the artist from period when he lived in New York, from 1960 to 1973, before he moved to Paris. The works are drawn from both the holdings of the Botero family and private collections, with some available for private sale.

“Botero in New York” marks the first exhibition the auction house has dedicated to a single artist since moving to the Breuer building, the former home of the Whitney Museum and the onetime home of the Met’s contemporary art annex and the Frick Collection’s temporary space. Earlier this year, Sotheby’s launched an exhibition initiative called “In Residence” that brought three Joaquín Sorolla paintings owned by Hispanic Society Museum & Library to the Breuer building.

“Botero was a natural choice for Sotheby’s first single-artist exhibition at the Breuer because few artists connect so directly to both New York and a global public,” Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s global head of Latin American art, told ARTnews by email. “It was here that Botero clarified the visual language that would make him one of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth century. From New York to Paris and Hong Kong, his paintings and monumental sculptures have crossed continents and cultures for more than sixty years. This exhibition returns to the city where that global language first came into focus.”  

With more than 20 works, the exhibition looks to trace how Botero developed his signature style of fleshy, rotund figures in eye-catching settings, now known as Boterismo. When the artist came to New York, the city’s art scene was still dominated by abstraction, with Minimalism and Conceptualism on the rise. His figurative works, oftentimes humorous, were in many ways a response to, and a protest against, those ways of working.

“New York was of profound importance to Botero,” the Botero family said in an email. “It was here that he arrived during his unwavering quest to refine his artistic language while remaining true to his creative convictions. His journey around the world ultimately brought him to this city, which became a defining chapter in his life. It was in New York that he encountered artists, critics, collectors, and museums whose influence would prove instrumental in shaping his career.”

In organizing the exhibition, Di Stasi said that the “aim was to show the development of Botero’s language over time and to make visible the formal decisions that led to the mature style. That meant looking for works that could speak to one another across the exhibition, whether through their use of space, their treatment of volume, their relationship to art history, or their engagement with everyday Colombian subjects.”

Some of the earlier works included, Di Stasi said, “show the artist still searching, drawing on Old Master composition, popular imagery, and Colombian visual culture,” while the works made in New York “reveal a growing confidence in the compressed space and volumetric quality that would become central to his work.”

The exhibition isn’t a complete survey of Botero’s work. Instead, it’s meant to assemble works that “have rarely been seen together. Their importance lies not only in their individual quality, but in what they reveal collectively. Seen side by side, they show Botero moving through a far more complex process than the public image of a fully formed style might suggest.”

She added, “We began with a curatorial question rather than a checklist of familiar images.”

Below, a selection of works that will feature in “Botero in New York.”