Fernando Botero, born in Colombia, South America, and resident of Paris and New York, is perhaps the most widely recognized and acclaimed artist with roots in Latin America. His unique style referred to as "Boterismo" has won him great admiration worldwide with many of his sculptures displayed as public art in major cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He is considered a figurative artist depicting women, men, daily life, historical events, animals and still life in his own very unmistakable imitable style. Both a painter and a sculptor, all of his creations are depicted with exaggerated and disproportionate features and volume. Although his characters are created with simple smooth flowing lines and soft curves, his artistic voice is especially complex. He has been essentially influenced by the great art history of Europe, particularly by masters from the Renaissance and the Baroque, elements of which he has combined with the Colonial Tradition of Latin America, to produce works of outstanding beauty, meaning, and strikingness.

Botero's organic and earthy works have brought him great success worldwide. As well as numerous public art commissions his works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Germany, the Museum Moderne Kunst, Austria, the State Hermitage Museum, Russia, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan, Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, Ho-am Museum, Seoul, Korea, among many others. In 1992, he was honored with an exhibition on the Champs Elysees in Paris, the first non-French artist to be so recognized, and he was also granted a large scale solo exhibition in the Grand Palais. In 1993, his works were displayed on Park Avenue in New York. After moving to New York in 1960, he won the Guggenheim National Prize for Colombia.

His career as an artist started very prodigiously, when as a sixteen year old his illustrations were published in the Sunday Supplement of the national daily newspaper in Colombia. The same year, 1948, his first works were exhibited in a group exhibition in Medellín, the capital of his home province, and by 1958, he had won first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos. Although having little access to the international art world, his first works were influenced by the Baroque style omni-present in the local churches, and his first themes and subject matter by the rich and colorful local life in the cities. The ebullient fun and earthiness present in his early works came to be pervasive throughout his life. As a fourteen year old he trained for two years as a matador and many of his early works depict the great emotion, strength and steeliness of this group of people. At the age of twenty-two he first travelled to Europe where he developed a life long passion for visiting museums, and studying in great detail the great European Masters.

He enrolled in the "Academia San Fernando" in Madrid, and spent many hours in the Prado Museum copying the great works of Velázquez and Goya. One year later, he moved to Paris, where again he spent most of his time in the Louvre Museum studying the Great Masters. The same year, he moved to Florence, where his studies of the works of the Renaissance masters was to have an enormous influence on his later works, particularly with the depiction of women, as in our present work. He fell under the spell of such luminaries as Giotto, Michelangelo, Raphael and Uccello. In particular, he studied the art of Fresco painting, which has given indelible input to his paintings. In 1956, he moved to Mexico, where under the influence of Mexican mural painting of Diego Rivera, he found his own voice and style. He developed a flat, plastic style of painting depicting his subjects with his famous exaggerated and disproportionate contours and lines. He often includes details of mocking criticism and irony, but balanced with humor and fun. His works often ridicule, but rarely without humor, figures of power and authority everywhere, presidents, churchmen, soldiers, gang leaders for what he perceives as infantile behavior.

It is this humorous approach to social criticism, combined with the overflowing, celebration of life and energy within each person that won him immediate success in the United States, where he moved in 1960. He had numerous solo exhibitions all around the country culminating in his "Inflated Images" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1969, which solidified his position as a leading artist. In 1973, he moved to Paris, where he first began to produce sculptures, giving a three-dimensional life to the flat characters of his paintings. It is his sculptures, such as the present one, that have endeared his works to a very wide public globally. Ebullient and overflowing with life, they resonate and shimmer with life-giving energy and joie de vivre, none more so than in his portrayal of the female nude.

The female nude has been a continuous presence in the history of art, and although Botero has taken Renaissance depictions of full-bodied, voluptuous females as his starting point, he has created his own very special genre in which he celebrates the fullness and profusion of the female form. From the beginning of his career, he has always painted figures, human or animals, with their proportions hugely exaggerated. Sometimes referred to as "Fat" figures, Botero has said that as an artist he is attracted to certain forms without knowing why. He is intuitively attracted to the forms that he has used since he was a young man, and that it is not easy for him to rationalize or justify why he uses the forms. Viewers of his works can identify with this position, as his works demand our immediate attention, drawing our admiration, as they impart a warm feeling of wellbeing, which is difficult for the viewer to rationalize. The abstractness of his shapes and forms, which he has drawn from his intuitive aesthetic thinking resonate loudly and affectionately with his viewers. And it is this abstractness of form, which is his great addition to the long tradition of the portrayal of the female nude in the history of art.

"Woman in Bed on Her Stomach" is an outstanding work from his series of female nudes. The reclining female nude has a long history, and while following the forms of this tradition, Botero has breathed great life and purpose into our female lying on her stomach. Her rotundity and abundance appears as a celebration of femininity, a joyous presentation of her fecundity as she seems to revel in her voluptuousness. We are immediately held captive by her sleepy gaze as she exudes independence, confidence and nobility. Although Botero has stated that its difficult for him to rationalize the "large" forms he employs, we are instantly aware that in the great roundnesses and sizes of the woman, he has captured the full gracefulness and refinement of the woman. It seems as if the exaggerated forms capture and convey essential female essences.

As we move around the statue we recognize the coquettishly raised right leg, and we smile knowingly. This is a woman bursting with life, energy and confidence. We get an overwhelming sense of "ripeness", as she revels in her femininity and fecundity, as we fully understand Botero's great power in depicting qualities, essences rather than true forms. His great achievement is to sculpt a woman in all her glory without making her an object of desire or affection, instead conveying the warmth, gloriousness, and beauty of her inner core and thus challenging the pervasive and socially acceptable depictions of female beauty and perfection. Although nude, the woman avoids conveying overt sexuality, instead oozing passion and energy, inner strength and confidence.

Botero's art is in continuous demand worldwide. A major exhibition at the Kuntsforum, Vienna, titled, "Bolero" ran from October 2011 to January 2012. The exhibition, "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero" travelled throughout the United States and Canada from 2007 to 2011. Two recent series of his paintings, "Abu Ghraib" which he painted in response to the torture in the prison, and "The Circus" depicting circus characters achieved great critical acclaim. He continues to receive many public art commissions, for his warm, celebratory sculptures.