Museo de Antioquia

Introduction

The Museo de Antioquia stands in Medellín's historic Candelaria quarter, facing the famous Plaza Botero. Founded in 1881, it is Colombia's second-oldest museum and holds the world's largest collection of works by Fernando Botero. The building itself is a 1937 Art Déco landmark, originally Medellín's city hall, converted to a museum only in 2000. Botero, Colombia's most universal artist, sculpts humans, animals and still lifes in exaggerated volume; from 1997 he began donating hundreds of works and sculptures to his native city, and the 23 voluptuous bronzes in the plaza are his—the plaza itself is free and open for photos. Inside, beyond the Botero halls (about 119 originals), hangs the international collection he donated from his own collection—Picasso, Chagall, Dalí, Monet and others—alongside masters of Antioquia such as Débora Arango and Pedro Nel Gómez, plus permanent galleries of pre-Columbian ceramics and colonial religious art. The 1937 building wraps two patios: one with tall palms and a fountain, the other turned into a café overlooking the plaza—a good rest after the galleries. Seen together, plaza and museum place Botero's plump figures in the same city that reinvented itself from 'most dangerous city' to 'city of innovation', making this the most direct lesson in Medellín's cultural character. The contrast is telling: Botero's plump, serene figures stand amid vendors, bicycles and patrolling police, which is the real texture of downtown Medellín—art, street life and historical trauma compressed into a single block, until only the few hours before nightfall.

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