NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s is holding a selling exhibition dedicated to the artist Fernando Botero this summer, created in partnership with The Fernando Botero Foundation. Focusing on works created during the artist’s foundational New York period, between 1960–1973, the exhibition brings together paintings and sculptures directly from the Botero family and other private collections, many of which are on public view in New York for the very first time.

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Botero: In Search, 1948–1963

By Christian Padilla

Explore Fernando Botero’s formative years through painting, drawing, early influences, Colombian modernism, and the search for the unmistakable style that defined his art.

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Botero in New York is the first exhibition dedicated to a single artist to be held at Sotheby’s Breuer building, presented at the height of Sotheby’s Summer Season. Visitors will encounter the evolution of Botero’s painting style across these formative years, an important yet rarely explored chapter in his practice. Each of the 25 works from this period mark a distinct moment in the artist’s development, reflecting the period in which Botero was immersed in New York’s creative circles and in direct dialogue with many of the city’s leading artistic voices. The exhibition reveals the ways in which the artist developed Boterismo, pushing back against the dominance of abstraction which defined the era and instead developing his own monumental, humorous, deeply human figures, moving from expressive brushwork to the clarity and proportion that defined the style we recognize today.

Botero in New York marks the first collaboration of its kind between the Botero family and an auction house, and stands as one of the most comprehensive presentations of Botero’s work ever seen in New York. Select works spanning subsequent decades of the artist’s six-decade career will further illuminate the continuity and evolution of his visual language. The show continues the momentum of Sotheby’s Summer Season, offering a rare opportunity to experience Botero’s work in one of the world’s most vibrant art capitals. The Summer Season at the Breuer is presented in partnership with Sotheby’s International Realty.





“Botero’s New York years reveal an artist deeply engaged with the artistic currents around him, yet unwavering in his determination to develop a language entirely his own. The works in this exhibition show the foundations of that achievement: a painter who approached the European canon with independence, transformed the visual and social world of Colombia through his own imagination, and forged one of the most distinctive pictorial languages of the twentieth century.” --- Anna Di Stasi, Global Head of Latin American Art

Fernando Botero
(1932–2023)

Born in Medellín, Colombia, Fernando Botero’s early years were marked by determination to pursue his craft. By sixteen he was exhibiting in Medellín, and by nineteen he had a solo show at the Leo Matiz Gallery in Bogotá while working as an illustrator for the literary supplement of the Medellín daily El Colombiano. A national art prize soon allowed him to travel to Europe, where he immersed himself in the work of the Old Masters, including Diego Velázquez, as well as modern masters such as Vincent van Gogh, setting the foundations for the expansive visual references that would later define his work.

Botero’s influences were broad, spanning the colonial art of Medellín, pre-Hispanic sculpture, the Mexican muralists, and the rural Colombian landscape of his childhood—all held in conversation with the European masters he encountered abroad. Yet, by the late 1950s, after successful exhibitions across Latin America and in Washington, D.C., he arrived in New York and settled in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood alive with artistic possibility. It was here, in a building filled with painters, that a chance encounter altered the course of his life: Dorothy Miller of the Museum of Modern Art, visiting another artist, paused at Botero’s studio and left with Mona Lisa, Age Twelve.

This acquisition became the catalyst allowing the artist to rub shoulders with some of the most influential figures in the art world—among them Pierre Levai at Marlborough Gallery, Claude Bernard in Paris and Ernst Beyeler in Basel—and produce a succession of defining works, including Pope Leo X (after Raphael) (1964) and The Presidential Family (1967). His debut exhibition with Marlborough Gallery in New York in February 1972 sold out, marking the beginning of a decades-long partnership and confirming that his singular approach could thrive even in a city focused on Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

New York in the 1960s was also a time of challenge for the artist as Botero’s commitment to figuration placed him at odds with the prevailing winds of abstraction. He spoke often of resisting the “dictatorship of abstract art,” and critics, favoring the theoretical, sometimes dismissed his enlarged figures as unfashionable or overly accessible. Yet audiences saw a warmth and humanity that cut through the cool detachment of the avant-garde. His humor, sensuality and unmistakable sense of volume—the essence of Boterismo—resonated far beyond the debates of the moment.

A Glimpse Inside the Exhibition

Monalisa a los Trece Años
1959

Closely related to Mona Lisa, Aged Twelve, which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1961—Botero’s first acquisition by an institution—Monalisa a los Trece Años demonstrates Botero’s audacious rethinking of art-historical precedent. Created in 1959, this work offers a wry reinterpretation of Leonardo’s iconic sitter, presenting an unmistakably Boterian presence.

Recasting Leonardo’s most familiar prototype through altered proportion, compression, and deadpan humor, the painting, which has never been exhibited publicly, is both irreverent and rich in its examination of the function of images in popular culture—an instinct that paralleled the development of Pop Art in the early 1960s. Its unsettling stillness anticipates the psychological charge and exaggerated corporeality that would become central to Botero’s practice.

Apotheosis of Ramón Hoyos
1959

Executed in 1959 as an homage to the celebrated Colombian cyclist Ramón Hoyos Vallejo—five-time winner of the Vuelta a Colombia—this vibrant oil on canvas, which has not been shown since 2012, reveals the artist’s engagement with the abstract expressionist tendencies that informed his early practice. Botero transforms Colombia’s celebrated cyclist into a figure of ceremonial grandeur.

The work elevates a contemporary sporting hero through the compositional authority of religious and courtly painting, already revealing the artist’s instinct for turning popular subjects into images of monumentality.

Picnic
1973

Completed in 1973, this is the first time Picnic will be presented to the public. In Picnic, the artist’s Boterian language is extended to a scene of leisure and social ritual, where apparent ease gives way to a more ambiguous meditation on class, manners, and the choreography of public life and social performance.

Sunflowers
1977

Sunflowers (1977) demonstrates the reach of Botero’s mature vision beyond the human figure. The monumental blooms and oversized blue vessel transform van Gogh’s famous subject into a composition of sculptural weight and quiet tension. Inserting himself into this canonical tradition, Botero presents a sunny bouquet of sunflowers that borrow from both earlier vocabularies yet present a fully contemporary innovation: inflated, vivid and luscious. With their characteristically sunny palette, playfully volumetric forms and brimming vivacity, Botero’s Sunflowers offer a version of the iconic image that is purely his own. This work has not been shown since 2012.

Still Life with Watermelon
1976

Botero’s delectable still-lifes are deeply rooted in his admiration for Old Master Spanish painting. The artist’s early exposure to masterpieces at the Prado Museum in Madrid significantly influenced his artistic development and lifelong appreciation for Velázquez, Goya and other luminaries of Spanish art. Honing a style that blends volume and sensuality, reminiscent of those past masters but with a distinctive twist—his iconic Boterismo—Botero produced still-lifes that sparked a dialogue between the past and the present.

Here, the selection of watermelon as the chief element marks the painting as distinctly of the Americas; although it was introduced by Europeans in the 16th century, the fruit is now grown throughout the continents and has come to be a key national symbol for Mexico. Where the Master still life tradition often emphasized vanitas/the fleeting nature of time by showing fruits and other consumables in varied states of ripeness and decay, Botero’s still lifes have a surreal lushness, a ripeness and stillness that seems to stand apart from time.