Born in 1932 in Medellin, Colombia, Botero became interested in painting at an early age. His artistic precocity was evident in an illustrated article he contributed to the Medellin newspaper El Colombiano when he was seventeen. Titled Picasso and the Nonconformity of Art it revealed his avant-garde thinking about modern art. Botero moved to Bogotá in 1951 and held his first one-man exhibition there at the Leo Matiz Gallery. The following year, at the age of twenty, he was awarded a Second Prize at the National Salon in Bogota.

In 1950, he went to Europe, where he attended the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, copied Velázquez and Goya in the Prado and admired the frescoes in Florence. He went on a long visit to Mexico in 1956-57 and the experience of Muralism significantly influenced his future direction. In his own work, he introduced inflated forms, puffing up to an exaggerated size human figures, natural features, and objects of all kinds, celebrating the life within them while mocking their role in the world. He combined the regional with the universal, constantly referring to his native Colombia and also creating elaborate parodies of works of art from the past - whether Dürer, Bonnard, Velázquez or David. Not without humour, the symbols of power and authority everywhere - presidents, soldiers and churchmen - are targeted in his attacks on a society still infantile in its behaviour.

His vision involves the conviction that monumentality is not so much a question of size as it is of proportion. It is a search for the heroic in art, an attribute that Botero first discovered as a student in Florence. Today Fernando Botero divides his time between Paris, New York and Tuscany. His paintings, sculptures, and drawings are exhibited and represented in museum collections throughout the world.