Past EXHIBITION
Germán Botero – Geometer & Archaeologist
Apr 15, 2016—Jul 1, 2016
The etymological origin of the word “geometry” comes from “geo,” meaning earth, and “metric,” meaning measure. This can provide us a first insight into the vast and multiple works of German Botero (Fresno, 1946). Throughout t decades, this Colombian architect who graduated in the early 70s – and who was part of a generation that amidst the crisis of modernity overturned the learning of the trade into artistic practices that renewed the scope of the arts in Colombia – has built in metal, wood and stone a singular work of abstract body resulting from a synthetic process of a telluric vision, deeply connected to the earth.
His abstract geometric sculptures rise from earth like a cube, an essential figure in his initial works of a constructive nature, modular structures in which the negative space irradiates its lightness to a construction that draws us back to the notion of territory, key to architecture – which for him represented, as in the history of the world, the primal shelter, the origin of his relationship with art and the one that allowed him to rise as one of the pioneers of public art in the country. His art later derived in an investigation into the material culture in Antioquia andan appropriation of artisan objects that imbued his abstract work with the power to establish bonds between diverse historical times. He approached these starting from a paradoxical view: On the one hand, by abstracting forms from their referential context, he altered their dimensions in order to fully reveal a formal beauty devoid of the template of use and routine. On the other hand, he has never hidden the material and cultural origins of his series, so his abstraction preserves, hidden in its genesis, the bond that accounts for human presence on earth. Botero has managed to traverse, with full coherence, the journey that goes from a constructivist influx to a way of abstraction that links geometry with cultural interventions and yet beyond, to the sources themselves of the mythical memory of the world.
Selected Artworks
Trompos Installation
Botero, German
1986
High Temperature Ceramic
Botero, German
Germán Botero studied at the School of Architecture of the National University of Colombia. He was a founding member of the Industrial Design program at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and the art program at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, both in Medellín. In 1976 he was awarded the National Sculpture Award at the XXVI Salón Nacional de Artistas. This fostered his interest in creating artwork that explored geometric abstraction through sculpture.
