Artist: Fernando Botero

Sotheby's presents a selling exhibition in partnership with The Botero Foundation examining Fernando Botero’s pivotal New York years, from 1960 to 1973, a decisive chapter that marked the emergence of his signature volumetric style and spatial compression.

Working in deliberate contrast to the prevailing ethos of abstraction, Botero's work of this moment was deeply rooted in the Western canon while engaging with the same ideas and new techniques that drove the New York school and early Pop Art. Even in the context of his contemporaries whose work retained the human form, his monumental figures, imbued both with pathos and a winking sense of humor, present contrarian counterparts to the existential distortions of Francis Bacon and the gestural vitality of Willem de Kooning. From 1960 through the early 1970s, the exhibition charts Botero's journey from expressive brushwork to flatness, clarity, and geometric proportion, as his interest in the function of images in cultural memory tracked closely with the growth of Pop Art through the Americas.

This exhibition will include important works on loan from The Botero Foundation as well as a selection of works for sale. As the first exhibition dedicated to a single artist at the landmark Breuer building, Botero in New York arrives at the height of the summer season, when the city becomes a defining cultural destination for international visitors and collectors alike, offering a rare opportunity to experience Botero’s work in one of the world’s most vibrant art capitals.