Botero, dialogue with Picasso Exhibition, Aix-en-Provence

Some 60 works by Botero (oils, works on paper, sculptures) echo some twenty major works by Picasso, including the collections of the Picasso-Paris National Museum and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.

Despite different origins, histories and trajectories, these two great artists share common geographical and cultural references. From his youth, Fernando Botero (born in 1932) observed the work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), admiring the rich palette, the monumentality and sensuality of volumes. But Botero still admired Picasso's "non-conformism" (sic). In both artists, the deformation of bodies and volumes corresponds to a resolutely subjective look at reality. It also reflects a radically modern posture in the history of figuration, originally in each of them an inimitable artistic language, peculiar to each.

The respective careers of Botero and Picasso are crossed by major questions about painting and art. At the Hotel de Caumont, the Botero exhibition, a dialogue with Picasso, proposes to go from room to room themes they have appropriated:
- Portrait and self
- portrait - Appropriations of the history of art
- Still life
- The nude
- The artist in front of major historical and political events
- The bullfight
- The world of the circus
- Music and dance

Among the key works include the diptych Botero According Piero della Francesca (1998), the gigantic Pear (1976), the Pierrot(2007) or La Fornarina, after Raphael (2008) Botero; but also L'Acrobate (1930), La danse villageoise (1922), Massacre in Korea(1951) by Pablo Picasso and his interpretation of the Menines de Velázquez, 1968.

In parallel with the paintings, the exhibition will present some of Botero's sculptures including his imposing Cheval (1999), as well as some twenty drawings by the two artists. Technique widely exploited by the two artists, the drawing allows to discover a less known aspect of the work of Botero and a more intimate side of his artistic practice.