Little Girl in Red

The artist’s first experiments with proportional manipulation began in the mid-1950s; while painting a still-life, he placed a disproportionately small sound hole in the body of a mandolin, instantly transforming the instrument into an object of mass and monumentality. “After that Mandolin,” Botero has explained, “my world began to expand. I went on to figures and soon was creating a formal universe that found its supreme expression in small detail” (Fernando Botero, quoted in A.M. Escallón, Botero: New Works on Canvas, New York, 1997, p. 23). Painted in 1969, Little Girl in Red is a superb early example of those Boterian ideals coming to fruition.