The Kunstforum Museum of Vienna will feature an exhibition of Colombian painter Fernando Botero’s satirical and legendarily rotund artwork until January 15, announced Caracol Radio.
The Medellin-born artist called the collection, which includes 75 canvases, “very representative” of his work.
“The exhibition includes many of the themes I have painted all my life,” he said. The museum will display Botero’s artwork from as early as 1985 and as late as 2005.
The Kunstforum Museum organized the exhibition into rooms by theme, including “Bullfight,” “Daily Life in Latin America,” “The Catholic Latin America,” and a room devoted to some of Botero’s most recent and controversial work, “Abu Ghraib,” which depict the torture and abuse of detainees in the Iraqi prison at the hands of U.S. soldiers.
“Like many people, I felt shocked to see that the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom, had been torturing [people] in the same prison where Saddam Hussein was torturing,” Botero said of his Abu Ghraib artwork, which was lent to the museum by Berkeley University. “That revelation gave me a kind of anger that led me to do drawings and some paintings.”
The exhibition will also offer Austrians and foreign tourists a taste of Botero’s more classic Latin American work, including the notable “The Card Players” and “Slaughter.”
The Vienna museum ranks among the city’s most popular attractions, receiving over 300,000 visitors each year.