Fernando Botero | Art for sale, auction results & history

Few artists created a style as instantly recognisable as Fernando Botero — Colombia’s most celebrated painter and sculptor. His hyper-inflated figures, semi-satirical Old Master pastiches and cast of bullfighters, bishops, guerrillas and gangsters form one of the most distinctive bodies of work in 20th and 21st-century art. Botero’s renowned style — a compelling, often humorous exploration of power, politics and art in contemporary Latin America — continues to attract international collectors, with his paintings regularly offered for sale at Christie’s.

Born in 1932 in Medellín, Colombia, Botero had his first show in Bogotá aged 19. In his early 20s, he studied in Florence and Madrid, where he was enthralled by the works of the high Renaissance and Spanish Baroque. These would continue to inform his practice, from early paintings such as his Velázquez-inspired Girl Lost in a Garden (1959) to After Piero della Francesca (1998). By 1958, Botero was teaching at Bogotá’s Academy of Art.

In the early 1960s, the artist moved his studio to New York, where his voluptuous ‘Boterismo’ style began to emerge with works such as Mona Lisa, Age Twelve (1961) and Presidential Family (1967). In a period dominated by Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Botero’s work reinvigorated the figurative tradition, earning him great critical success. One of his most renowned paintings — The Musicians (1979) — currently holds the record price for Botero at auction, being sold for US$5.1 million at Christie’s New York in 2023.

During the 1970s, Botero moved to Paris and began experimenting with sculpture, producing works such as Big Hand (1976–77). By the 1980s, the artist's success was earning him large public commissions. Monumental pieces by the artist can now be enjoyed on the streets of New York, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Jerusalem, Bamberg in Germany and Yerevan in Armenia. Botero Plaza in Medellín is home to 23 of his sculptures.

Alongside his paintings and sculptures, Botero was also an experienced draughtsman. As a 14-year-old boy, the artist had sold his first drawing for two pesos — a sketch of the bullfighting school where he was himself studying.

Although Botero maintained that ‘art should be an oasis, a place of refuge from the hardness of life’, his work was at times stridently political. Beginning in the 1990s, he painted a series focusing on Colombia’s drug-related violence. One painting, Death of Pablo Escobar, depicts the Colombian drug baron being gunned down by the police. Later, he produced his Abu Ghraib series, focusing on reports of the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

The artist died in 2023, leaving behind a substantial legacy — the Botero Museum in Bogotá houses over 100 works by the artist alongside modern and contemporary pieces from his personal collection. His enduring impact was explored in Fernando Botero: Selected Works, a 2025 curated selling exhibition by Christie’s New York. In 2026, his influential oeuvre was showcased in Botero in Singapore, the largest showcase of Botero’s artworks to date.