Botero moved to Bogota 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. With the money he earned from the Salon award and his exhibition, Botero fulfilled his longtime desire to travel to Spain, France and Italy to study the work of the old masters. In Madrid, he visited El Prado Museum daily while studying at the San Fernando Academy. In Florence, he studies at the Academy of San Marcos and was profoundly influenced by the works of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello and Andrea del Castagno.
It was during a brief stay in Mexico that Botero produced Still Life with Mandolin (1956), the first work in which "puffed-up" form makes a definite appearance. Two years later he was awarded a First Prize at the National Salon in Bogota for his Bridal Chamber: Homage to Mantegna, a work inspired in Mantua. Botero later did a second version on this theme, which is now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum.
Botero moved to New York in 1960 and the following year the Museum of Modern Art of New York acquired his painting Mona Lisa, Age Twelve for its collection. During this period he experimented briefly with a gestural brushstroke, which Botero called his flirtation with the School of New York. Over the next years Botero continued to explore the manipulation of form for aesthetic effect, gradually eliminating al traces of brushwork and texture, opting instead for smooth inflated shapes. His continuing attraction to the Colombia of his youth is reflected in paintings rooted in small town Colombian life-middle-class family groups, heads of state, prelates, madonnas, military men, prostitutes and opulent still lives with exotic fruit. By the end of the 1970s, Botero's fame was world-wide.
In 1973 Botero left New York for Paris and began to produce sculpture, although without giving up painting. His work in a three-dimensional art was a natural progression for an artist singularly dedicated to expressing volume and mass. It is not the semblance of volume, however, but volume itself, a tangible volume, that the medium of sculpture offers. His vision involves the conviction that monumentality is not so much a question of sizes 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.
Botero's concept is "Art is deformation" that it transforms reality. His objects range from 8 to 12 feet in height or length, and weigh between 1,900 and 5,100 pounds. Bronze Sculptures works include Maternity (1989), Roman Soldier (1985), Man (1990), Woman (1989), Torso (Man)(1992), Rape of Europa (1992), Woman with a mirror (1987), Little bird (1992), La pensee (1992), Torso (Woman) (1982), The Left hand (1982), Reclining woman (1993), Man on a horse (1992), Cat (1984), Horse (1992), Mother and Child (1993), Adam (1990), and Eve (1990)
Today Fernando Botero divides his times between Paris, New York and Tuscany. His paintings, sculptures, and drawings are exhibited and represented in museum collections throughout the world. He is an artist who at a very early age developed a style of his own which established him firmly both on the local art scene and abroad, and as one of the masters of twentieth-century art.