Botero, ZuDiga shine at New York art auction

New York, Nov 21 (EFE).- Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero has a starring role as ample as his rotund subjects in dueling auctions of Latin American art here by Sotheby's and Christie's.

His oil "The Card Players II" fetched the highest price - $1.6 million - in Sotheby's sale Monday of 46 lots.

The picture adorned the cover of the catalogue for the occasion, which bought in $14 million, precisely the upper limit projected by the auction house.

On Tuesday, Christie's gets its turn with the 74-year-old Colombian, featuring his "The Lovers," for which someone is expected to spend over a million dollars.

Botero's sculptures also went over well at the Sotheby's affair, as did those of Costa Rica's Francisco ZXDiga. Other standout performances included those by Mexican painter Gunther Gerzso, one of whose works set a personal record, and Cuban Wifredo Lam.

"The prices for the sculptures were exceptionally good and we saw the participation of buyers from all over the world, some of them new to the market," said a pleased Carmen Melian, director of Sotheby's Latin American art department.

Botero's paired bronzes "Adam and Eve" went for $576,000, while "Woman with a cigarette" was bought for $464,000.

The Colombian holds the record for a work by a living Latin American artist, having seen his "The Musicians" sold last May by Christie's for $2.1 million.

ZuDiga, known for his oversize figures of Indian women, had his "Three Women Walking" group sculpture sold for a neat million.

That was about what had been expected. But one of the evenings most enthusiastic receptions was for his onyx sculpture "Nude of Virginia," which fetched $688,000, or five times what had been estimated.

Melian said that work from 1977 is "a masterpiece of his early period." The artist in later years preferred working in bronze on serial pieces.

Gerzso's "Landscape," from 1957, was sold for $620,000, a record for the artist whose work is seldom seen at auction. That same painting, described as a mix of cubism and surrealism effected in tones of blue, was sold by Sotheby's in 1995 for $151,000.

Generalized and enthusiastic applause greeted the bids made after it surpassed its maximum estimated sale price of $300,000.

Lam's "Five centimeters above the earth" also more than doubled its estimated sale price, fetching $688,000. That was a bit above the $632,000 paid at the session for "Femme Cheval."

Marysol Nieves, vice president of Latin American art for Sotheby's, said "both of those paintings are representative of Lam's work in the 1950s, when he simplified his composition and restricted the range of colors, and exhibit the maturity of his idiom and his great skill as a draftsman."

Chile's Claudio Bravo also made a surprisingly strong showing. His "Visus Tactus" (2000), a hyper-realist canvas, was sold for $688,000, well above the maximum estimate of $450,000.

Botero, South America's best known living artist, made waves last year with a series of works depicting the sordid drama of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where U.S. soldiers routinely tormented captives.

He portrayed his vision of the abuse and torture in his traditional coloristic, somewhat innocent style in which the human figures are rounded and fleshy, at times appearing even baby-like. But the approach did not hide the harshness of the treatment to which the real prisoners were subjected by their poorly supervised guards.

"War and injustice are everywhere and I'm very sensitive to torture," Botero said inauguration of the series exhibition in Rome in June 2005.

The United States "is the richest and most powerful country, and the world expects its conduct to be exemplary. Therefore, cases like the one at Abu Ghraib meet with general condemnation," he said. EFE

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