Fernado Botero’s art world; a Perspective on the Great Crime that took place in Baghdad, Iraq that’s known as Abu Ghraib Prison
Since the age of nineteen-the year of his first solo exhibition-Fernando Botero has delighted his audience with joyful rotund figures, the figures that we can tell how it populated his large scale canvases. Fernando Botero, like any great artist; he was compelled to paint the female. More than 100 of his greatest works devoted to the theme of women are collected in his oversize deluxe volume, the design of which was overseen and directed by the artist himself.
One of the important elements that I have been searching and looking for to learn more about this artist style technique when I found out that most of the internet sites, books, articles and video sources were all saying that Botero have never worked from live models as he feels it limits from his "creativity". The women in his work are inspired by the women he has known throughout his life. Most of his women were selected to be more similar to what he has seen in his family members, relatives, and neighborhood characters who mostly were from his native Colombia. In the early 1950s, he left Colombia to study the paintings of great artists, such as Diego Velazques and Piero Della Francesca, all of which made a lasting impression on the artist himself. Botero's early life and education: Fernando Botero was born the second of three children in Medellin, Colombia. His parents were David Botero and Flora Angulo. David Botero, was a salesman who traveled by horseback, he died when Fernando was in age four, and his mother worked as a seamstress after his father's death. However, his ancle took a major role in his life. Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other cultural institutes, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches and then the rich of the city. As a youth, Botero attended a school for matadors for several years, but his true interest and passion was in art. While Botero still a teenager, he began painting and was inspired by the pre Colombian and Spanish colonial art that surrounded him as well as by the political work of Mexican famous artist (Diego Rivera). His own paintings were first exhibited in 1948, and two years later, in Bogota, he had his first one-man show. While studying painting in Madrid in the early 1950s, he made his living by copying the paintings housed in the "Pardo Museum" particularly those of his idols it the time, Francisco de Goya and Diego Velazques.
Botero's distinctive style of smooth inflated shapes with unexpected shifts in scale is today instantly recognizable. It reflects the artist's constant search to give volume presence and reality. The parameters of proportion in his world are innovative and almost always surprising. Appropriating themes from all of art history - from the middle Ages, the Italian quattrocento, and Latin American colonial art to the modern trends of the 20th century - Botero transforms them to his own particular style. Going more specifically about Botero's style and the controversial topics or series that he has been painting about and exhibiting between his native Colombia, New York City, Berkeley, California, and some other western countries in Errouple, such as France, England and Spain! For me I got more interested in introducing my classmates about a very sensitive issue that Botero have touched on more recently! Not because, I'm originally from Middle East and Iraq, specifically and because of that reason I got interested to emphasis on the artwork that discuss war, tragedy of war or what is really happening in secret prisons and detention centers in my native Iraq - Baghdad, and from that area I will be more than glad to discover with you all Fernando Bolero's recent series that he titled them by "Abu Ghraib paintings".
Fernando Botero is one of Colombia's most outstanding artists, he became well known abstract artist for the rotund human and animal figures of his monumental bronze sculptures and distinctive paintings. Although, as series of his massive, incredible, fabulous sculptures was displayed in France and then the United States in the early 1990s.
Painting of Fernando Botero ( Abu Ghraib Prison )
"Botero is a successful artist who has achieved popular acclaim as well as recognition from the art establishment. But lately his cheery and mild-mannered paintings have suddenly turned into works of profound and biting social commentary. Six years ago he began painting the bloody reality of his native Columbia, and just last year he exhibited paintings in Colombia's capital of Bogotá that focused on his nation's 40-year-old guerrilla war. However, Fernando Botero's latest paintings go beyond anything he's ever created in the past. "" I, like everyone else, was shocked by the barbarity, especially because the United States is supposed to be this model of compassion. "The artist was so upset about what the US had done in Iraq that he set out to create a series of paintings that would forever etch the crime upon the collective consciousness of humanity. What Botero has achieved is nothing short of a contemporary equivalent to Pablo Picasso's Guernica, the masterwork painted in outrage over the aerial bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War. Said Botero, "No one would have ever remembered the horrors of Guernica if not for the painting." And no one will ever forget the vision of hell Botero has committed to canvas with these startling oil paintings. Each work is titled Abu Ghraib and given a number from 1 to 50 to set them apart. Not that they need to be differentiated, because each oil is a unique and bone chilling representation of what US soldiers did to their prisoners behind Abu Ghraib's silent and impenetrable walls. In one painting the artist shows a US soldier savagely beating a defenseless blindfolded prisoner, in another a naked prisoner is handcuffed to his cell wall as though crucified-with women's underwear left on his head like a hood. Yet another of the forbidding works depicts three naked, hooded and trussed Iraqis heaped in a pyramid. All of the artist's paintings in the series are based upon actual testimonies that came out of the prison scandal, and Botero's paintings are imbued with an unflinching and indignant moral outrage.
His new paintings and sketches - conceived not from photographs or specific acts of torture but rather from his reading of news reports - depict gruesome scenes of prison abuse. One inmate hangs from the ceiling, a rope around his ankle. Another work shows a soldier beating a prisoner with a baton, while yet another portrays a soldier urinating on an inmate. In many of the works, inmates simply scream in pain. "Botero's paintings got the cold shoulder here despite favorable reviews in a range of respected publications. In an article titled "The Iconography of Torture" in this month's edition of Art in America, for example, the reviewer said the Abu Ghraib paintings "bear comparison with much of the political art of the modern era ... Like Guernica, Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings are a cry of pain at the pointless suffering inflicted on the victims of wars. "The Washington Post's culture critic called it a" remarkable show, and a disturbing one. "(Part of an article that was posted and written by Louis Freedberg). Also, "One of the works shows three naked, bound and hooded Iraqis stacked in a human pyramid behind prison bars. The only color in the sketch is red blood pouring from one of the detainees. Another is a painting of an American soldier swinging a bloody club at the head of a half-naked, helpless man. Many of the characters have the puffiness normally seen in Botero's works, but some have the physique of beefy body builders. "(Common Dreams, web page.).
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Botero's distinctive style of smooth inflated shapes with unexpected shifts in scale is today instantly recognizable. It reflects the artist's constant search to give volume presence and reality. The parameters of proportion in his world are innovative and almost always surprising. Appropriating themes from all of art history - from the middle Ages, the Italian quattrocento, and Latin American colonial art to the modern trends of the 20th century - Botero transforms them to his own particular style. Going more specifically about Botero's style and the controversial topics or series that he has been painting about and exhibiting between his native Colombia, New York City, Berkeley, California, and some other western countries in Errouple, such as France, England and Spain! For me I got more interested in introducing my classmates about a very sensitive issue that Botero have touched on more recently! Not because, I'm originally from Middle East and Iraq, specifically and because of that reason I got interested to emphasis on the artwork that discuss war, tragedy of war or what is really happening in secret prisons and detention centers in my native Iraq - Baghdad, and from that area I will be more than glad to discover with you all Fernando Bolero's recent series that he titled them by "Abu Ghraib paintings".
Fernando Botero is one of Colombia's most outstanding artists, he became well known abstract artist for the rotund human and animal figures of his monumental bronze sculptures and distinctive paintings. Although, as series of his massive, incredible, fabulous sculptures was displayed in France and then the United States in the early 1990s.
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| Painting of Fernando Botero ( Abu Ghraib Prison ) |
"Botero is a successful artist who has achieved popular acclaim as well as recognition from the art establishment. But lately his cheery and mild-mannered paintings have suddenly turned into works of profound and biting social commentary. Six years ago he began painting the bloody reality of his native Columbia, and just last year he exhibited paintings in Colombia's capital of Bogotá that focused on his nation's 40-year-old guerrilla war. However, Fernando Botero's latest paintings go beyond anything he's ever created in the past. "" I, like everyone else, was shocked by the barbarity, especially because the United States is supposed to be this model of compassion. "The artist was so upset about what the US had done in Iraq that he set out to create a series of paintings that would forever etch the crime upon the collective consciousness of humanity. What Botero has achieved is nothing short of a contemporary equivalent to Pablo Picasso's Guernica, the masterwork painted in outrage over the aerial bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War. Said Botero, "No one would have ever remembered the horrors of Guernica if not for the painting." And no one will ever forget the vision of hell Botero has committed to canvas with these startling oil paintings. Each work is titled Abu Ghraib and given a number from 1 to 50 to set them apart. Not that they need to be differentiated, because each oil is a unique and bone chilling representation of what US soldiers did to their prisoners behind Abu Ghraib's silent and impenetrable walls. In one painting the artist shows a US soldier savagely beating a defenseless blindfolded prisoner, in another a naked prisoner is handcuffed to his cell wall as though crucified-with women's underwear left on his head like a hood. Yet another of the forbidding works depicts three naked, hooded and trussed Iraqis heaped in a pyramid. All of the artist's paintings in the series are based upon actual testimonies that came out of the prison scandal, and Botero's paintings are imbued with an unflinching and indignant moral outrage.
His new paintings and sketches - conceived not from photographs or specific acts of torture but rather from his reading of news reports - depict gruesome scenes of prison abuse. One inmate hangs from the ceiling, a rope around his ankle. Another work shows a soldier beating a prisoner with a baton, while yet another portrays a soldier urinating on an inmate. In many of the works, inmates simply scream in pain. "Botero's paintings got the cold shoulder here despite favorable reviews in a range of respected publications. In an article titled "The Iconography of Torture" in this month's edition of Art in America, for example, the reviewer said the Abu Ghraib paintings "bear comparison with much of the political art of the modern era ... Like Guernica, Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings are a cry of pain at the pointless suffering inflicted on the victims of wars. "The Washington Post's culture critic called it a" remarkable show, and a disturbing one. "(Part of an article that was posted and written by Louis Freedberg). Also, "One of the works shows three naked, bound and hooded Iraqis stacked in a human pyramid behind prison bars. The only color in the sketch is red blood pouring from one of the detainees. Another is a painting of an American soldier swinging a bloody club at the head of a half-naked, helpless man. Many of the characters have the puffiness normally seen in Botero's works, but some have the physique of beefy body builders. "(Common Dreams, web page.).
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