In Sotheby’s Botero Show, Rare Works Meet a Resurgent Global Market

After mounting museum-level blockbuster shows and an eclectic exhibition tracing the country’s history at its new Breuer headquarters, Sotheby’s is staging its first show dedicated to a single artist. On view through September 7, the exhibition spotlighting the work of Colombian artist Fernando Botero was conceived in partnership with Botero’s family and built around works from their archive. Many of those works have never before been shown publicly, which feels well-aligned with Sotheby’s “New World” experience strategy, which aims to turn each of its worldwide headquarters into a top destination for luxury and culture designed to appeal to art collectors, luxury buyers and broader audiences just there to look. The Breuer location, in particular, has already drawn crowds more than twice as large as its former York Avenue location in the first half of 2026.

The focus of the Botero show is the artist’s relationship with New York, gathering works produced between 1960 and 1973 when he was living in Greenwich Village. “New York was of profound importance to Botero. It was here that he arrived during his unwavering quest to refine his artistic language while remaining true to his creative convictions,” his family told Observer, recounting how his journey around the world brought him to the city, kicking off what became a defining chapter in his life. “It was in New York that he encountered artists, critics, collectors, and museums whose influence would prove instrumental in shaping his career. This exhibition brings that moment back into view, including works from our collection that have never been seen in public before, reunited in the very city in which they were created.”

Born in Medellín, Fernando Botero was ambitious, exhibiting at 16 and having his first solo show at just 19 while working as an illustrator for El Colombiano. A national art prize let him travel to Europe, where encounters with the Old Masters, Diego Velázquez and Vincent van Gogh complemented influences ranging from colonial and pre-Hispanic art to Mexican muralism and the Colombian landscape. After building a reputation across Latin America and Washington, D.C., Botero moved to Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. A chance studio visit by MoMA curator Dorothy Miller led to the museum’s acquisition of Mona Lisa, Age Twelve—the artist’s first institutional acquisition—helping connect him with dealers including Pierre Levai, Claude Bernard and Ernst Beyeler. He went on to produce major works such as Pope Leo X (after Raphael) and The Presidential Family, while his sold-out 1972 debut at Marlborough Gallery confirmed that his figurative style could succeed even in an Ab-Ex-dominated New York art scene.

On view at Sotheby’s are 25 paintings and sculptures charting this important period in Botero’s practice and highlighting how firmly he held to his artistic vision at a time when almost everyone else was moving in the opposite direction. Going against what he described as the “dictatorship of abstract art,” and largely indifferent to prevailing aesthetic trends and contemporary ideals of beauty, Botero developed his own distinctive and deeply human visual language of rounded forms, voluptuous female bodies and enlarged ordinary urban characters. While critics sometimes dismiss his enlarged figures as unfashionable or overly accessible, audiences respond to their warmth, humor, sensuality and unmistakable sense of volume—the qualities that came to define “Boterismo.”

Included in the exhibition is Monalisa a los Trece Años, a painting closely related to Mona Lisa, Aged Twelve. The painting offers a wry reinterpretation of Leonardo’s iconic sitter in an unmistakably Boterian visual lexicon. Also on view is a much more dynamically fragmented 1959 canvas, Apotheosis of Ramón Hoyos, conceived as a tribute to the celebrated Colombian cyclist Ramón Hoyos Vallejo, a five-time winner of the Vuelta a Colombia, through an epic composition rooted in art history and referencing pre-Columbian art. Other highlights include Picnic (1973), in which Botero’s visual language expands into landscape; the Van Gogh-inspired Sunflowers (1977); and the lush Still Life with Watermelon (1976), which reflects his enduring devotion to the great masters who preceded him.

Botero’s market experienced a remarkable acceleration after the pandemic, a momentum that continued to strengthen after his death in 2023. Artnet reported that his annual auction sales rose from $9.7 million in 2020 to $21.2 million in 2023, then reached $25.1 million by November 2024. Recent auction results further underscore this strength, confirmed Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s global head of Latin American Art. Works such as Horse have achieved prices above $4 million at Sotheby’s, while paintings have consistently realized multimillion-dollar results at auction. Even in a more selective market, strong examples regularly exceed their estimates, confirming sustained demand for museum-quality works.

Today, the market for Botero’s work is mature but increasingly selective, according to di Stasi; “top-tier works continue to perform strongly, especially those with clear quality, scale, strong provenance, and relevance to his core periods.” Demand, she adds, tends to focus on major oils from the late 1960s and 1970s, along with iconic subjects such as social scenes, portraits, musicians and still lifes. High-quality bronzes also remain in demand, benefiting from their public visibility, as many are installed as public sculptures around the world, while smaller editions circulate widely at auction.

Botero pieces are no longer purchased only through specialist Latin American sales channels, and the buyer base for his work has become fully globalized. While Latin American collectors remain important, there is strong participation in the artist’s market in the U.S. and Europe, with growing interest from the Middle East and Asia. “At the top end, prices have been reinforced by these recent auction results, confirming sustained international demand,” di Stasi explains.

Botero consistently ranks among the most instantly recognizable Latin American artists, yet his auction record remains modest compared with those of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and even some less universally known postwar figures. His current top result is $5.132 million for The Musicians, sold at Christie’s New York in 2023.

The fact that his widespread global recognition has not translated into eight-figure auction prices can be attributed in part to the artist’s extensive output across paintings, drawings, bronzes and editions, as well as to the critical resistance to the accessibility and repetition of his imagery. The recurring presence of nudity in his work may also have limited its reception in some markets, particularly in countries such as the U.S., where a new (and paradoxical) puritanism has taken hold. Botero’s estate, art galleries and auction houses are now actively reframing the work through exhibitions and secondary-market offerings, both to strengthen its market valuation and to broaden its collector base.

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