After the solo show in 2006, Fernando Botero returns to Milan and to Galleria Tega with an exhibition that includes a nucleus of Still Lifes and a series of paintings made over the last twenty years on themes he particularly cherishes, from the Circus to Nudes, from the depiction of power to that of the family, together with a group of works on paper and bronze sculptures.
Born in Medellin, Colombia in 1932, Botero is certainly one of the most famous and popular artists in the world. His activity is divided among four studios – New York, Monte Carlo, Pietrasanta and Colombia – where he continues to produce his inimitable paintings. A world citizen, but also tied to the culture of his homeland, Botero has been a forerunner by several decades of today’s global perspective of an art without fences or boundaries: he can be understood and appreciated in any place at any time, for the continuous connection to the classical in an absolutely contemporary vision that also embraces reflections on politics and society.
For his exhibition in Milan, produced by Galleria Tega in Partnership with UniCredit, Botero is at the top of his form. Among the most spectacular paintings, besides the group of Still Lifes never shown previously, we find The Family (2013), a masterpiece of synthesis in the composition of the four figures and the background landscape, with the invention of a tree that horizontally cuts the balance, as happened in certain Marine works by Carlo Carrà. While in The President (2003) the theme of the politician returns, the figure of the dictator Botero has often used as a metaphor of the arrogance of power and the vanishing of liberty, and in Trainer and Horse (2008) the atmosphere of the circus returns, which has taken him close to certain images of the cinema of Federico Fellini, it is in the nudes that we can once again discover the ability to look at a volume, finding an extraordinary equilibrium in deformity and hypertrophy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Skira with two texts by Luca Beatrice, the images of all the works in the show and the reproduction of a series of over one hundred works, including, sculptures, oils and works on paper, made by the artist from the early 1990s to the present.