Fernando Botero: Gli Ultimi 15 Anni, Rome

Fernando Botero returns to Rome, 15 years after his last exhibition, with an exhibition of 170 works on view at Rome's Palazzo Venezia Museum. Paintings, drawings and sculptures chronicling the most recent achievements and poetics of one of the world's best-known living artists. Inspired by the Latin American painting tradition, mediated by the study of European art and contacts with the contemporary art scene, Botero elaborated - starting in the late 1950s - his very personal and unmistakable style dominated above all by his great characters, ironic and metaphysical, which have now entered the universal imagination. In addition to the works related to his best-known production, the artist presents at Palazzo Venezia the 'world premiere' of a cycle that, by his own will, is destined to tour the world. A selection of works born out of anger and dedicated to the horror of the Abu Ghraib prison.  The theme of violence and its denunciation had interested his early training, which developed from his confrontation with Mexican murals and the Picasso of Guernica, and had already been addressed by the Colombian master to recall the events that bloodied his country in the 1990s. In this case, the images of tortured prisoners are all the more stark as they are closer to the memory of a war, the one in Iraq, that has marked our memory. This initiative was made at the initiative of the Polo Museale Romano and the Benucci Galleries in Rome and Contini Galleries in Venice.