Bullfight

Book excerpt: Bullfight: Paintings and Works on Paper is Glitterati's second collection of works by world-renowned Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Featuring more than 140 oils paintings and 35 drawings, this book is a comprehensive look at another of the artist's most iconic subjects. In his youth, Botero developed a passion for bullfighting that has remained with him throughout his illustrious, six-decade career. The artist was profoundly influenced by the spectacle of the bullring - the vivid colors, the dynamic movement, the beauty and violence, bravery and fear. In Botero's signature style, the figures of the bullfight appear inflated and voluptuous, a grandiose exploration of scale, space, and volume. Matadors and picadors, horses and bulls, spirited crowds and striking portraits - all are exaggerated and exalted by the hand of the artist. As Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald writes, "His task is not to reproduce reality as it appears before the naked eye but rather to reinvent or reconstruct it according to his personal experience and accumulated feelings. In this sense there is no painter more truly Colombian than Botero. And yet, the more genuinely local his art is, the more universal it becomes."