'Great Crime' at Abu Ghraib Enrages and Inspires an Artist
By JUAN FORERO
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 7 - Fernando Botero, Latin America's best-known living artist, shocked the art world last year when he broke sharply from his usual depictions of small town life to reveal new works that depicted Colombia's war in horrific detail.
Now, Mr. Botero, 73, who lives in Paris and New York, has taken on an even more explosive topic: the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Forty-eight paintings and sketches - of naked prisoners attacked by dogs, dangling from ropes, beaten by guards, in a mangled heap of bodies - will be exhibited in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia museum on June 16.
"These works are a result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world," Mr. Botero said by telephone from his Paris studio.
"I began to do some very fluid drawings, and then I began to paint and the results are 50 works inspired by this great crime."
Mr. Botero said the paintings and sketches, done in oils, pencil and charcoal and part of a 170-piece traveling exhibition, would also be shown at the Würth Museum in Germany in October and at the Pinacoteca in Athens next year before returning to Germany. ...
No exhibitions in the United States are planned, though Mr. Botero said he would like nothing more. ...
[Samples of works are shown at website below.]
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/international/americas/08botero.html?hp>
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