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Fernando Botero’s monumental black Horse stands 10 feet tall and extends 7.5 feet across. The bronze is the first of two artist’s proof versions, plus the edition of three. It sold at Sotheby’s New York on November 20 for $4.9 million, making it the most expensive sculpture by the artist to sell at auction and the artist’s second highest auction price.
Estimated to fetch between $3 million and $5 million, the consignor, identified only as “an esteemed Southwestern collection” in the sale catalogue, bought the work at Sotheby’s in 2002 for $504,500, just over the estimated presale range of $400,000 to $500,000. At the time, it was offered in a Latin American evening sale.
Since then, Botero’s works have migrated from the regional sales into the most prestigious evening auctions. Horse will be included in the auction house’s “The Now” and contemporary evening sale—a sign of the increased global popularity of the Colombian artist, who is known for his rotund human figures. The work’s current low estimate marks a nearly 500 percent increase on its previous sale price.
Unlike many of his male contemporaries, the Colombian figurative artist, who died last year, has had a strong market since the pandemic. Data from Artnet Analytics shows that total auction sales of his work more than doubled between 2020 and and 2023, rising from $9.7 million to $21.2 million. That record has been surpassed already this year, with $25.1 million in auction sales, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Botero’s auction record stands at $5.1 million, achieved last year for his 1979 painting, The Musicians, at Christie’s. The most expensive sculpture is Man on a Horse (1999), an 11-foot-tall bronze that fetched $4.3 million in 2022, also at Christie’s.
