Fernando Botero obituary

In the 1970s Fernando Botero’s preoccupation with capturing volume led him to start producing huge bronze sculptures, such as this giant cat in his home city of Medellín, Colombia. Photograph: Age Fotostock/Alamy

The rotund, colourful men and women painted and sculpted by Fernando Botero, who has died aged 91, made him perhaps the most popular Latin American artist of his generation and also one of the most commercially successful.

For years, art critics looked down on what the Colombian himself called his “fat people”, dismissing them as a trademark gimmick. But museums and collectors (including Hollywood celebrities such as Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone) snapped them up. His paintings and sculptures were so immediately identifiable for their bloated proportions that his work even gave rise to the term “Boterismo” to describe his aesthetic.