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The critically acclaimed monograph Circus: Paintings and Works on Paper explores Fernando Botero’s depictions of the circus, one of his favorite arenas to study. His images are filled with light, color, poignancy and beauty. Similarly, Bullfight: Paintings and Works on Paper covers his favorite topic and one that like Circus is widely explored by major artists throughout history and includes the author’s curated selection of artworks and drawings. Each has a foreword by renowned art critic Curtis Bill Pepper.
Whether it’s the Ringling Brothers or Cirque du Soleil, the circus is a universal tradition, bringing people together in the name of amusement and festivity. The same is true for bullfight, a tradition celebrated through history in virtually every Spanish speaking nation in the world. In these rich assemblages luxuriously presented in an a luscious lucite slipcase with the artist’s renowned signature silkscreened on the outside of the box, the reader will find an assemblage of the artist’s work on the only two theme topics that offer enough variety and expanse to be able to be offered as the subject of an individual book and have never before been published (each book) as a complete collection on the subject. Botero’s constant exploration of volume have made his artworks the most well-known by the widest general public in the world.
Following in the tradition of great painters inspired by the circus—Renoir, Seurat, Lautrec, Picasso, Chagall, Léger, and Calder, among others— Botero explores light, color, style, and space with a poignancy that highlights—through the extravagant proportion of his figures—the exceptional beauty of the human body. These are all creations that are instantly recognizable as the work of a master.
Bullfight: Paintings and Works on Paper is Glitterati’s second collection of works by world-renowned Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Featuring more than 140 oils paintings and 35 drawings, this book is a comprehensive look at another of the artist’s most iconic subjects. In his youth, Botero developed a passion for bullfighting that has remained with him throughout his illustrious, six-decade career. The artist was profoundly influenced by the spectacle of the bullring—the vivid colors, the dynamic movement, the beauty and violence, bravery and fear. In Botero’s signature style, the figures of the bullfight appear inflated and voluptuous, a grandiose exploration of scale, space, and volume. Matadors and picadors, horses and bulls, spirited crowds and striking portraits—all are exaggerated and exalted by the hand of the artist. As Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald writes, "His task is not to reproduce reality as it appears before the naked eye but rather to reinvent or reconstruct it according to his personal experience and accumulated feelings. In this sense there is no painter more truly Colombian than Botero. And yet, the more genuinely local his art is, the more universal it becomes."
