Horses are a permanently recurring theme in Botero’s oeuvre. They are somehow "archaic" or "minoic" types, formed by Botero's aesthetic approach, his normative of beauty. Another historic cultural source of Botero is the Precolumbian heritage of his home country and the whole Latin American continent. The principle of voluminous bodies, an exaggeration of forms, can be interpreted mostly as positive signification of fertility, opulence, abundance and, finally, voluptuousness. The sensuality and luxury of Botero's sculptures has ist peers in this sense and in their ironic distance also in modern sculptures of that motif, first of all if one looks at Marino Marini's horses.
Botero’s paintings and sculptures are united by their proportionally exaggerated figures. Botero explains his use of these "large figures", as they are often called by critics, in the following way: "An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it." So, Botero is an abstract artist in the most fundamental sense, choosing colors, shapes, and proportions based on intuitive aesthetic thinking. “Boteresque” deformation is in some way modern. Botero has full control of his imagination and memory, allowing him to enlarge the diminutive and diminish the enormous, turning things to a fantastic idea of fiction.
Provenance available
