On Fernando Botero: The Triumph of Form at the Hangaram Art Museum

 

The figures were enormous. Not in actual dimension — the paintings were canvas-sized, the sculptures bronze and finite — but in their insistence on being looked at, their refusal to make themselves small, their absolute rejection of the apologetic posture that a certain tradition of art criticism has always preferred from figurative painting. They took up room. They took up the room. And standing inside the Hangaram Art Museum at the Seoul Arts Center on the afternoon of May 3rd, moving from canvas to canvas in the long galleries, I began to smile and understand his humor and philosophy behind the paintings and sculptures. 

"I have never painted a fat figure in my life," Fernando Botero once told his daughter Lina, who co-curated this exhibition. "What I created was a universal sense of volume, where every human figure, animal, landscape and object was treated in the same way — with the intention of giving generosity and sensuality to form." Volume is a philosophy about the world — the conviction that things deserve more space than we give them, that the orange on the table and the woman at the window and the general on his horse are all, each in their way, worthy of expansion.

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Fernando Botero Angulo was born on April 19, 1932, in Medellín, Colombia. His father, a traveling salesman, died when Fernando was four. His mother worked as a seamstress to support the family. The childhood that follows from these facts — fatherless, financially precarious, raised in a city that was then, as now, a place of beauty and violence existing in the same breath — appears everywhere in his work, though never directly. Botero did not paint his biography. He painted the world around his biography: the bourgeois families in their best clothes, the cardinals asleep in their vestments, the markets and festivals and bullfights and circuses of a Latin American life that he observed from the outside for long enough that when he finally entered it as an artist, he saw it whole.

His uncle sent him to a school for matadors when he was twelve — two years of learning the discipline and choreography of the bullfight, which would surface decades later in a long series of bullfight paintings. He left matador school for art, which is to say he traded one form of discipline for another, one ritual for another, one arena for another. By sixteen he was illustrating for a local newspaper. By eighteen he had his first solo exhibition. In 1952 he sailed to Europe with his gallery earnings and arrived in Madrid, where he spent his days at the Prado copying Goya and Velázquez — not as an act of homage but as an act of study, absorbing through the hand what the eye alone could not retain.

It was in New York, in 1960, that the style arrived. By the time he moved to New York City, Botero had developed his trademark style: the depiction of round, corpulent humans and animals, referencing Latin-American folk art in his use of flat, bright color and boldly outlined forms. He favored a smooth look in his paintings, eliminating the appearance of brushwork and texture — the surface sealed against the viewer, inviting looking but refusing the intimacy of visible making. His formal portraits of the bourgeoisie and political and religious dignitaries referenced the composition and meditative gravity of Goya and Velázquez while doing something entirely different with proportion: the inflated figures suggesting satire, perhaps, or simply abundance, the painting refusing to decide which.

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He lost a son.

In 1974, while driving between Sevilla and Córdoba on a family holiday, a truck lost control and crashed into their car. Pedro was four years old. Botero survived, but he lost the phalanx of the right little finger. His work Pedrito a Caballo was painted in the months following the accident. He said the best painting he ever made was of his late son. "I still had the bandages on when I painted it."

This painting hung in the exhibition, and so did something else. Lina Botero highlighted a pastel portrait of her younger brother, Pedrito, as one of the most memorable works in the Seoul exhibition. The piece, painted after the child's death at the age of four, was discovered decades later in a storage space in New York, where it had remained unseen for more than forty years. It had survived in storage for four decades, unseen, while the painter moved between Paris and Pietrasanta and Monte Carlo and the world's auction houses and Park Avenue, until someone opened a crate and found it there — the small boy, painted by a father with bandaged hands, still waiting.

I stood in front of it for a long time. There is a quality in certain paintings — not the famous ones, not the canonical ones, but the ones that were made in extremity and were never quite put away — that resists the museum context. The lighting, the label, the other visitors moving past: none of it quite reaches the painting. It exists in its own climate, which is the climate of grief that has been made into form and has therefore lasted longer than the grief itself.

The exhibition at the Hangaram Art Museum presented 112 of his oil paintings, drawings and sculptures, focusing on his practice from the 1970s through to his later years, organized into six sections. The exhibition features over 112 works, several of which have never been exhibited before — his second return to Korean audiences after eleven years. The dark works — the Abu Ghraib paintings, the Drug War series, the 1995 bombing in Medellín that destroyed his Bird of Peace sculpture and killed more than twenty people at an outdoor concert — were not included. His daughter referred to these as "two parentheses in his artistic creation." "He always returned to what he believed was the purpose of art: to create pleasure."

I had mixed feelings about this curatorial decision, which I recognized even as I felt it was the right one for this particular afternoon. Botero's darker works exist and matter — the Abu Ghraib paintings, in which the tortured prisoners appear in his signature rounded forms, had the paradoxical effect of restoring dignity to the figures the photographs had stripped of it, a critical miracle that almost no other contemporary artist achieved. But the pleasure works, gathered into six rooms in Seoul in the spring of 2026, made their own case. The dancing couples, the fruit so ripe it seemed about to overflow its own skin, the cheerful arcadia of the circus performers and the musicians and the women at their mirrors — these were not an evasion of reality. They were an argument about what reality was for.

"My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not," Botero told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. "I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it." The critics who dismissed him over the decades did so largely on the basis of this accessibility — the suspicion, which the art world has never quite shed, that what everyone can understand must be somehow insufficient. Botero was unimpressed by this suspicion. He had grown up without access to museums, had earned his education by copying the Old Masters in the Prado, had spent a career making work that crossed every border — linguistic, cultural, economic — without requiring translation. The pleasure his work created was not a lesser pleasure for being widely available. It was, if anything, the point.

He died on September 15, 2023, at the age of ninety-one, in Monaco, from complications of pneumonia. He had spent his final years too weak to stand at an easel with large brushes but experimenting, his daughter said, with watercolors — still painting, still looking, still trying to give things the volume they deserved. Colombian President Gustavo Petro called him "the painter of our traditions and defects, the painter of our virtues."