For two years, between 2010 and 2011, famed Colombian artist Fernando Botero produced one of his most significant cycles of paintings, commemorating Christ’s Passion. This cycle, made up of twenty-seven oil paintings and thirty-four works on paper, has drawn large audiences internationally and is now available by special arrangement with the Museum of Antioquia in Medellín.

Botero’s The Passion expresses a theme that has been a feature of Botero’s work since his youth in Colombia, a world abounding in public and private religious imagery. His expansive vision references earlier treatments of the subject— but never a simple imitation—by some of the leading figures in Western art history, including Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Peter Paul Rubens, Paolo Uccello and Diego Velázquez.

Since developing his mature style in the 1970s, Botero has become known for building sensual worlds peopled with beings brimming with immense pleasure and happiness, and through the tranquil and sumptuous abundance of forms. His exaggerated and sometimes distorted style, frequently used as a means of commenting on his country’s fractured politics, is among the most beloved and recognizable in contemporary art.

The Passion represents a crossroads where memories of his childhood intersect forms of worship deeply ingrained in his culture, and in his broader iconography. The soft features, the ideas and the environments that at first seem so stable, are disrupted by a profound upheaval, in which grief and tragedy take center stage.

In addition to its resonance with Baroque and Renaissance art, this exhibition engages with educational themes such as Latin American history and culture, intersections between art, literature, politics and religion, and humor and satire in painting.

Produced in association with GLOCAL Project Consulting, Rome .

WORKS
61 total; 27 paintings & 34 drawings

DIMENSIONS
Various

SPACE REQUIREMENTS
142 linear feet (43 linear meters)

INQUIRIES
exhibitions@curatorial.org | 626.577.0044

FEE
Please inquire.