(born in Medellin, Colombia in 1932; lives and works in Paris and New York)
L’Odalisque, 1998, oil on canvas, 52 x 42 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Dieter Brusberg, Germany
Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above)
Telemarket, Italy
Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above by the present owner in 2002)

Fernando Botero’s distinctive style is best represented in his immediately recognisable depictions of hyper-inflated and voluptuous human figures who fill the pictorial space and demonstrate the artist’s ongoing fascination and experimentation with volume and the sensuality of form.

Colombia’s most celebrated living painter and sculptor first began his experimentation with proportions, volume and form in the 1950s when he was painting a still life of a mandolin and painted a disproportionately small sound hole in the body of the instrument: “After that Mandolin, my world began to expand. I went on to figures and soon was creating a formal universe that found its supreme expression in small detail.” (Fernando Botero, quoted in A.M. Escallón, Botero: New Works on Canvas, (New York: Rizzoli, 1997), 23.). For Botero, painting the mandolin in this way opened up the potential to transform any figure or item into an object of mass and monumentality. In the present painting, the artist has included not only the characteristic mandolin, but also a naked woman or ‘Odalisque’, who holds the instrument over her lap. She projects a monumental presence, both through her exaggerated bodily proportions and the way in which her form takes up most of the pictorial space and canvas, leaving very little background for her figure to settle in to. Whilst the figure dominates the painting, Botero succeeds in creating harmony in the composition through his customary use of a limited colour palette, where a number of colours are deliberately repeated for different elements of the painting (in the red of the hairband, chair, ring and necklace, for example).

The evocative title of this painting ‘L’Odalisque’, draws attention to Botero’s well-known appreciation of the history of art, and his propensity to rework celebrated subjects or scenes from the canon of art history into his own unique style. The figure of a woman presented as an odalisque or concubine was a very popular symbol of sexuality and eroticism used in Orientalist art of the nineteenth century, with artists such as Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres producing very famous paintings of the subject. In these paintings women were often depicted naked or scantily dressed, with head scarfs and jewels ornamenting their bodies. In the present painting, Botero re-employs these distinctive motifs, making a nod to art historical precedents, whilst revising them to reflect his own particular vision and style. In a manner that has become synonymous with the artist’s many depictions of women, he once again experiments with the various roles that society has confined to women – from matriarch to prostitute – whilst succeeding in producing an artwork that is recognisably by his own hand.