Artist Fernando Botero Turns His Attention to Abu Ghraib

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Two days ago Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib series came to Washington, DC at the Katzen Arts Center in the American University Museum, and will remain until December 30, 2007.

The series, now consisting of about 50 paintings and sketches, was initially presented during the spring of 2005 at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, then later in Germany and Greece. Finally, for the first time in the United States, in October 2006, the Abu Ghraib series was displayed at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. In spring of 2007, the series was exhibited at the Center for Latin American Studies in the University of California in Berkeley .

Botero, 73 and living in Paris and New York, usually created benign pieces, though also somewhat satirical. Until recently, the artist’s works have been mostly associated with placid life in small towns in Columbia.

Yet anger gnawed at him when he learned about the torture inflicted by Americans onto Iraqi detainees in the Iraq prison.

“As I'm an avid reader, I started to read everything I could about what happened, and I was shocked because Americans are supposed to be the model of compassion... The things that happened in the Iraqi cells were serious, very serious. And especially because they flouted completely the conditions imposed by the Geneva convention concerning the treatment of prisoners of war," Botero said.

He was more inspired by what he read, he added, rather than what he saw in the photographs.

Botero’s Abu Ghraib series is a strange marriage of horror and caricature. The result of his unique style being incorporated into the subject is frankly dark, disturbing, and also extremely bizarre. Instead of the gaunt, starved figures one would expect to find from such a theme, we are instead met with that odd chubbiness, making each figure less real, and more like a misshapen memory which won’t go away. The engorged, suffering figures look painfully swollen and bloated, as though they’ve been filled with so much water and they are about to burst. It almost brings back to mind the infamous procedure of water boarding, and how the Bush administration seems unwilling to stop it or admit to it being torture.

Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 72, 2005 - Courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY image:35091:4::0

The prisoners in the paintings and sketches are naked, or dressed in women’s underwear, and shown bleeding, being beaten, humiliated, and attacked by dogs that look less like canines, and more like the stuff of nightmares. One sketch shows a soldier urinating on two naked, bound prisoners, though the soldier’s head disappears at the top of the paper. Also, nearly no eyes are drawn in any of Botero’s Abu Ghraib series. Almost all of the prisoners are either blindfolded or hooded, while the soldiers heads are usually averted or completely cut off from the painting or sketch.

The series was well-received in Europe, where anti-war sentiments are fairly strong, and it will be interesting to see how it does in the States. Botero does not plan to sell the paintings. Instead, he intends to donate them to museums as a reminder of the horrors depicted.

"It is immoral to try to make money out of the suffering of people," he says.