Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World

Fernando Botero’s work is instantly recognisable and unfortunately, routinely misunderstood. His rounded figures are often described as humorous or simply “fat”, a reading the Colombian artist resisted throughout his life. For Botero, the subject was volume: the sensual, monumental presence created when proportion is deliberately altered. Opera Gallery London’s forthcoming Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World focuses in this principle.

Opening on 12 October, just two days before Frieze London and Frieze Masters begin in Regent’s Park, the exhibition is cannily timed for one of the capital’s most important art weeks. Frieze runs from 14 to 18 October this year, bringing almost 300 galleries from 48 countries and regions to London. Botero’s first London solo exhibition since 2015 brings together paintings, drawings and sculptures made across almost six decades, from the mid-1960s to the final year of his life in 2023, with scenography conceived by Cécile Degos.

The origins of Botero’s distinctive visual language are actually very simple. In 1957, while working on a mandolin, he reduced the size of its central rosette and discovered that the entire instrument suddenly appeared monumental. That small adjustment became the foundation of an approach he would apply to people, fruit, animals, furniture and landscapes. He had already absorbed the Old Masters at close quarters, working as a copyist at Madrid’s Prado, where Velázquez and Goya became part of the artistic vocabulary he would later bend to his own ends.

Three of Fernando Botero’s most remarkable works showing at In Praise of an Amplified World at Opera Gallery: Maternity (2005);
Nudo, Donna in abito rosso (2013); and Portrait of Picasso (1998).

There is also something distinctly autobiographical running through his work. Botero was sent to bullfighting school at the age of 12 and began drawing scenes from the ring. El Arrastre (1984), featured in the London presentation, returns to that world with its horses, matadors and compacted drama. The artist used the same visual language to address Colombia’s violence and, most famously, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, producing 51 paintings and 50 drawings in response to the scandal.

His figures can be comic, tender and absurd, but they can also be deeply disturbing. This contrast is clear in the show, In Praise of an Amplified World, bringing extra depth to Botero’s familiar silhouettes.

Botero’s generosity was as substantial as his art: in 2000 he donated 208 works to Colombia’s Banco de la República, forming the collection from which Bogotá’s Museo Botero was created.

During Frieze week, Opera Gallery brings us a chance to reconsider an artist whose immense popularity sometimes obscured his seriousness. His enlarged forms gave everyday life a weight and intensity all their own.

Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World
Opera Gallery, London
12 October – 12 November 2026
More information, HERE.

Author: Lina Ress