Fernando Botero at Opera Gallery London: a world made bigger
‘In Praise of an Amplified World’, on view until 22 November, is the artist's first solo show in the city since 2015.
Most people who know Botero know one thing: round figures. This show at Opera Gallery London goes wider. It brings together portraits, still lifes, landscapes, sculptures and works on paper from the 1960s to the last years of his life. It isn't a retrospective so much as a generous selection, drawn from the gallery's own collection and put together in close contact with the artist's estate, and it gives a good sense of how much ground he covered.
The lead painting is ‘El Arrastre’ (1984), named for the moment in a bullfight when the dead bull is dragged out of the ring. Three white horses with pink pompoms and a yellow saddle haul the animal across the sand, a small patch of red near its head. Three men in red shirts and caps whip the team on, one bent over the carcass, while a matador in yellow and blue raises an arm at the edge. Behind them the stands are full, the crowd painted as a dense field of tiny faces under a hard blue sky.
Look at how the bodies are built. The men and horses are heavy, with small hooves, small shoes and small features set into large forms. The scene is restrained. A job is being done in front of thousands of people, and the weight of it is what stays with you. Painters had taken on bullfighting before him (Goya, among others, made a whole series of etchings on it), and Botero's version is quieter and stranger. There's a political edge to it, in how little the picture flatters anyone, but the painting never says what it thinks.
That way of building bodies goes back to 1957. Painting a mandolin, Botero made the sound hole smaller than the body of the instrument would suggest, and instead of correcting it, he saw that the object felt more present. In ‘El Arrastre’ you can see where that led. The proportion that started with a sound hole has become a way of seeing people and animals, with small details sitting inside large, calm forms.
The same logic runs through the rest of the show, across very different subjects. What changes from one theme to the next is the mood, from public spectacle to private quiet, while the way the world is built stays the same. The selection doesn't try to chart every shift across six decades, and the pleasure lies in seeing how little the underlying idea needed to move.
Botero copied at the Prado as a young man, and the old masters are present in a quiet way. The stillness of ‘El Arrastre’, with every figure held in place as if the moment had been frozen, recalls the calm of Piero della Francesca. The crowded, patient scene has something of Goya's interest in what a crowd does when it watches. Botero doesn't copy either, but he learns from both.
Botero died in 2023, aged 91. What this show leaves you with is a habit of looking. In El Arrastre the tiny faces in the stands all watch the dead animal that fills the foreground, and standing in front of the painting, you become one of them. Botero makes the spectacle large enough that you can't look away, and keeps the people small enough that you recognise yourself in them.
Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World
Opera Gallery London
12 October to 22 November 2026
