Fernando Botero: Museum of Fine Arts

A new temporary exhibition was launched at the Museum of Fine Arts at the Heroes Square in Budapest yesterday. In my eyes this seems to be a quite family friendly exhibition, as the paintings made by Fernando Botero looks both funny, interesting and quite cool.

Fernando Botero is a Latin American contemporary painter.

Fernando Botero’s paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Fine Arts
September 30 – February 20, 2011

Budapest museums

Press release about the exhibition:
Rotund and voluptuous forms, characteristically simple and expressive figures, people, animals and objects dominate the works of Colombian-born Fernando Botero. The language of his colourful and often luminous works is understandable for all; he opens up a seemingly distant Latin American reality and transforms it into a familiar world. His works are linked by the underlying quality of universality and his use of the most elemental gestures renders his ideas of the world and its various phenomena visible. Botero is a productive artist and a leading figure of contemporary art whose works can be found in public collections in countries across the world including Japan, Russia, Germany, Finland, Italy, Colombia and the United States. A selection of the masterpieces of the last twenty years can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest between 30 September 2010 and 23 January 2011.

Some sixty, mostly large oil paintings and sculptures will be presented at the exhibition, allowing an insight into a unique world that can be described by a kind of striving for monumentality and timelessness rooted in the ancient Greco-Latin tradition, while demonstrating how the artist draws inspiration and pays tribute to the classical European masters and invites visitors to the land of Latin America throbbing with life and colour.

Based on their themes, the paintings can be grouped into still-lifes, paraphrases, as well as the places and events of life in Latin America: everyday streets, colourful houses, the circus and bullfighting arenas. The concept of the exhibition is not exclusively built around a thematic arrangement of the works since it also focuses on the precedents that appear in the painting of the Colombian artist.