Lebanon - Figurative Sculptures

Fernando Botero (Colombian, b.1932) is celebrated for his painted and sculpted scenes featuring animals and figures with inflated proportions, reflecting the artist’s predilection for satire, caricature, and political commentary. Born in Medellin, Colombia, Botero began exhibiting his paintings there in 1948, and later worked as a set designer in Bogotá. In the 1950s, he traveled to several different European countries, including Spain, Italy, and France, to study the work of Renaissance and Baroque masters. He also traveled to Mexico to familiarize himself with the current Mexican avant-­‐garde. Botero became renowned for the varied source material he drew upon, from Colombian folk imagery to canonical works by Diego Velázquez, Pablo Picasso, and Francisco de Goya. In his depictions of contemporary Latin American life, he portrays the poverty and violence prevalent in Colombia in somber images, as well as in his iconic inflated figures, satiric images of Latin American presidents, first ladies, and government officials. A meeting with Dorothy Miller from The Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960s proved to be a turning point in his career; she acquired his work at a time when abstraction was the celebrated idiom, and he later exhibited his work in a major exhibition at the museum, solidifying his international reputation. In the 1970s, Botero moved to Paris, where he created large figural sculptures...

Born in Florence, Italy, Michelangelo Bastiani studied and graduated at the Florence's Art Institute and later at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, where the artist majored in painting and photography under Maestro Gustavo Giulietti. Bastiani has lived in New York and California before settling in Tuscany. He has held critically-acclaimed exhibitions in the Italian cities of Florence, Capri, Milan, Venice, and Pietrasanta, and internationally in London, Paris, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Oslo, and Kiev. The Mark Hachem...