Custot Gallery Dubai is pleased to present a major exhibition of still life paintings, drawings and watercolours by the internationally renowned Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. These works, which come from the artist’s own collection and are being exhibited for the first time, were created between 1980 and 2018.

 

Throughout thirty still life works representing flowers, fruit, objects, musical instruments and fantastic scenes of everyday moments, the artist pays tribute to the Old Master paintings he studied as a young student in Europe during the 1950s.

 

In 1956, Botero painted Still life with mandolin, marking a major turning point in his career. By changing the size of the central hole of the instrument, the proportions of the mandolin also changed, giving the impression that the instrument was growing. Botero felt that something important had happened. From now on, he found his style and he would play with the proportions and the distortion of volume, not only in his human figure but also in his still life work. An evocation of Still life with mandolin, entitled Mandolin on a table, painted in 1998, is part of the retrospective.

 

Fernando Botero (born in 1932 in Medellín, Colombia) is a figurative artist and painter. His signature style of smooth inflated shapes with unexpected shifts in scale is today instantly recognisable. His first retrospective took place in 1970 in Germany at museums in Baden Baden, Berlin, Dusseldorf and Hamburg. His work is held in important museum collections troughout the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland and Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. 

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