Looking ahead to spring at area museums

As we turn to a new page on the calendar, and with it, the anticipation of spring, the region’s museums are ready for the season with new exhibits. So shake off those winter doldrums by checking out the newest doings at our museums. Here’s a sampling.

Nassau County Museum of Art
NCMA greets spring by revisiting the works of Fernando Botero in a major exhibition that showcases the talents of one of the most honored Latin American artists working today. “Fernando Botero,” which opens March 13, includes a range of paintings, drawings and monumental sculpture. These works exemplify Botero’s most familiar themes: commonplace scenes of everyday life, life in the bedroom, life of the streets, and people rapt in the excitement of music or family activities. Throughout, Botero’s characters are seen in their “Botero-esque” girth and grandeur. This famed artist was the subject of a major 2005 exhibition at the museum.
  A native of Colombia, Botero began to achieve acclaim in the 1960s for his satirical paintings of oversized, flesh figures with large limbs and small bodies. In 1971, he began making sculptures as well, an example of which is Man on Horseback – a self-assured gentleman in a suit and bowler hat, his legs as large as those of the horse. This work greets visitors along the wooded path leading to the museum and is a permanent part of NCMA’s Sculpture Park. Botero’s smooth rounded depictions of people and animals exhibit a comic disregard for correct proportions. This skewing of form is central to works by Botero. Regarding distortion as the essence of art, he has said: “In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.”
Among his talents, Botero is one of the most well-known and respected of the late 20th-century still-life painters. His representations of fruits, flowers, vegetables, sweets, meats, and cheeses embody many of the characteristics that are observed in his other subjects. They display a marked engagement with sensuality. There is a sense of the sacramental or the ritual in many of these paintings.