Beschreibung:

Details
FERNANDO BOTERO (B. 1932)
Equilibrist
signed and dated ‘Botero 07’ (lower right)
oil on canvas
175 x 117.5 cm. (68 7/8 x 46 1/4 in.)
Painted in 2007
Provenance
Galeries Bartoux, Honfleur
Private collection (acquired from the above, 2011)
Gift from the above to the present owner
Literature
Botero, Circus: Paintings and Works on Paper, New York/London, Glitterati, 2013, p. 111 (illustrated).
Exhibited
Monaco, Marlborough Monaco, Fernando Botero Peintures, sculptures et aquarelles, April – June 2010, p. 10 (illustrated)
Post lot text
‘At the circus one finds colors, movements, poetry, expressions of the human spirit that one finds nowhere else. I went to see a circus in Mexico, and I had the chance also to meet these people in the backstage that they had, and I was fascinated by the possibilities and the poetry of the subject. That’s why I started to do this.’ –Fernando Botero
Inspired by a chance encounter with a modest traveling circus in Mexico in 2006, the Circus series by the artist also hints at the autobiographical, harkening back to Botero’s childhood in Colombia. As a young boy in Medellin, Botero attended the circus every time he could, when he managed to scrape enough money to buy a ticket, but now his childhood nostalgia was enriched by a creative awareness: his astonishment to see, through the eyes of an artist, this magical universe, filled with action and movement, with fascinating characters and bright hues, all united in one space and under one large tent. In this series, the artist’s choice of bright colours and surprising composition to interpret the poetry of the circus invites the viewers to participate in this festival of colours and forms.
In these 3 paintings coming from the artist’s Circus series, Botero’s portly protagonists, always a lady, stand stoically erect and decidedly indifferent to the seemingly impossible act of hoisting her enormous body on to a tiny trapeze bar or on the head of her performance partner. Similarly, in Botero’s work the viewer is asked to eschew logic and to embrace an imaginative world in which improbably corpulent figures occupy spaces with impossibly skewed perspectives. The perspectival play in Equilibrist and Trapezist allow Botero to accentuate the monumentality of his figures. Here the female figures appear audaciously rotund not only because Botero has rendered her with ample hips and thighs but also because of the minute scale of the audience and other performers. By filling the circus benches in the background with mere specks of blurred flesh tones, Botero creates the illusion of a colossus in the foreground. In the Circus Woman, the artist captures an extremely rare behind-the-scenes moment, during which the female performer is sitting alone with brooding expression. She seems to be immersed in deep reflection or waiting for the performance to start. Her voluptuous shape of body fills up the entire space without any traces of eroticism, embodying the artist's iconic element of contrast.
Acting as an ideal subject that allowed Botero to delve deep into the fantasies while simultaneously looking to his own past as well as the art history, the circus stands out as a singular series in the artist’s long and prolific career, offering up an inimitable wellspring of creativity.