The image on these pages is a detail from a painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Botero’s series of riveting paintings and drawings that reimagine the shocking photographs, revealed in 2003, of the abuses of Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad can be seen in his book Botero Abu Ghraib.
Botero, in his Abu Ghraib series, suggests that anyone with a sense of humanity must realize that fighting terrorist attacks with further acts of cruelty and terror is not the right solution.
(David Ebony, Associate Managing Editor of Art in America, text in “Botero Abu Ghraib”)
PHR is grateful to Mr. Botero for allowing the use of his painting for the report and these pages.
Botero’s distinctive style of smooth inflated shapes with unexpected shifts in scale is today instantly recognizable. His style reflects the artist’s constant search to give volume presence and reality. The parameters of proportion in his world are innovative and almost always surprising. Appropriating themes from all of art history—from the Middle Ages, the Italian quattrocento, and Latin American colonial art, to the modern trends of the 20th century—Botero transforms them to his own particular style.
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