Fernando Botero (né en 1932) Lot n° 14

MAN ON A BENCH, 2011 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower left 97 x 71 cm - 38.18 x 27.95 in. Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower left Provenance - Art Plural Gallery, Singapore - Private Collection, London (acquired from the above-mentioned gallery in 2014) A certificate from the artist will be given to the purchaser Fernando BOTERO HOMME SUR UN BANC, 2011 His warm curves are like no other, for he is the painter of opulence and sensuality whose morning palette imperceptibly softens the subjects depicted. Men or women, all of them always seem nimbus of lightness, as one comes out of a soft night without dreams. Botero, like a glass-blower, stirs up voluptuous shapes in his canvases, which he caresses with oil, working the colours to reveal the flesh's still generous skin tone. His appetite for figurative art as well as his jubilant taste for form and the dilation of volumes is a very audacious paradigm in an era where Abstraction reigns. Whatever. The painter, who decided to observe the world through the prism of a horn of plenty, preserves his intimate repertoire: the light of the Quattrocento and popular art. While New York institutions, then the kingdom of Abstract Expressionism, gave him a lukewarm reception, the Gres Gallery in Washington, D.C., devoted a solo exhibition to him in 1958, with international repercussions (on the evening of the opening, all the works exhibited were sold). One year later, Botero was chosen to represent Colombia at the Fifth Biennial of São Paulo. As for 1960, this year will be decisive since the writer Gabriel García Márquez asks the painter to illustrate his text "La siesta del Martes", which appears on the front page of El Tiempo (Bogota): his painting goes around the world. New York, this time, asked him to do so, as he was awarded the Colombian section of the Guggenheim International Award. Since then, Botero's works have found the