Executed in 1983, Woman with Serpent is a beautiful example of Fernando Botero's early sculptural output. Having established his unique pictorial idiom in painting, Botero in the early 1960s began to explore the potential of working in three dimensions to push his aesthetic further. It was, however, truly in the 1970s that he dedicated himself to this medium.
"Sculptures permit me to create real volume... One can touch the forms, one can give them smoothness, the sensuality that one wants."
– Fernando Botero
Botero became so fascinated with working in sculpture that between 1976 and 1977 he essentially abandoned painting, focusing solely on the plastic arts. In the early 1980s, this new-found enthusiasm for sculpture saw him acquire two buildings in Pietrasanta, Tuscany, positioning him near the marble quarries used by Michelangelo, and a number of the world’s best bronze foundries, which had sprung up around the quarry.
It is in the foundries of Pietrasanta that artists as diverse as Henry Moore, Joan Miró and Jeff Koons have had their works cast. Botero still today divides his time between his main homes in Paris and Pietrasanta, devoting himself to sculpture while in the latter. This reveals the way in which Botero’s works are underpinned by a conscious communion with the Old Masters of Renaissance Italy. It was, after all, during his time in Florence in the 1950s when he had begun to consolidate his style, abandoning the fireworks of conspicuously and self-consciously avant-garde painting in order to create works that conveyed a sense of form, volume and figure.
Working in that same classical sculptural tradition as his predecessors, Botero initially creates a clay maquette that is then scaled up in plaster, followed by the creation of a cast used to ultimately render his model in bronze. Botero’s attention to detail can be perceived in Woman with Serpent and its fellow sculptures in the deep resonance of its patina, one which accentuates the sensuality of the curves of his figure. Granted an emphatic physicality, the figure bursts with life and the raw power of existence.