BOGOTA, Colombia — Fernando Botero, one of Latin America’s most celebrated artists, has died. According to his daughter, Lina Botero, the 91-year-old Colombian artist was suffering from complications from pneumonia and died at his home in Monaco.

“Fernando Botero, the painter of our traditions and defects, the painter of our virtues, has died,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced on social media.

In his paintings and sculptures, Botero often depicted rotund, whimsical figures that poked fun at the upper class of his native Colombia.

Born in Medellín, he was the son of a traveling salesman and a seamstress and once harbored a desire to be a matador.

He spent most of his life living in Europe and the United States, but often returned to Colombia for inspiration. His home city has declared a week of mourning in his honor.

Botero’s works are instantly recognizable. His figures are corpulent and slightly absurd.

One painting depicts a Roman Catholic cardinal fast asleep in full clerical garb. Another shows a snake about to bite the head of a woman posing for a family portrait and gave rise to the term “Boterismo” to describe the voluptuous, almost cartoonish figures in his artwork.

Later in his career, Botero turned to darker subjects, like drug violence in Colombia. During an open-air concert in his home town of Medellín in 1995, guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, placed an explosive device beneath his bronze sculpture, “Pájaro” (“Bird”), killing more than 20 people and injuring more than 200.

He also painted victims of U.S. abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “These works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,” he said.

His works were hugely popular, sometimes selling for millions of dollars, and adorned major museums as well as the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Park Avenue in New York, as well as his home town of Medellín and the capital Bogotá, where the Botero Museum resides.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Renowned Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, whose depictions of people and objects in plump, exaggerated forms became emblems of Colombian art around the world, has died. He was 91.

Lina Botero told the Colombian radio station Caracol that her father died Friday morning in Monaco of pneumonia complications.

Botero depicted politicians, animals, saints and scenes from his childhood in an inflated and colorful form that was instantly recognizable. During his lifetime the artist attained global fame and influence, despite his humble origins, and his paintings were exhibited in museums globally, while his imposing bronze sculptures can be found in the parks and avenues of many European and Latin American capitals.

“His success was truly immense” Botero’s son Juan Carlos, wrote in a biography of his father, published in 2010. “Fernando Botero has created a unique style, that is original and easy to recognize.”

Botero’s paintings fetched millions of dollars at international auctions, and the artist was highly esteemed in his native Colombia, not just because of his success abroad, but due to the generous donations he made to his home country, including 23 statues, that are now in a park in downtown Medellín, and have become one of the city’s most visited attractions.

Botero also donated 180 paintings to Colombia’s Central Bank which were used to create the Botero Museum in Bogotá. His sculpture of a white, chubby pigeon, standing proudly on a pedestal became an emblem of Colombia’s efforts to make peace with rebel groups and is currently placed in a prominent gallery inside the nation’s presidential palace.

Many Colombians appreciated Botero’s art because it evokes nostalgia for the country as it was in the early 20th century. His characters wear bowler hats, and sport neatly trimmed mustaches. They move around in a colorful universe of green hills and lush trees, where homes are made with clay roof tiles.

“The painter of our traditions and our defects, the painter of our virtues has died,” President Gustavo Petro wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Friday. “He painted violence and peace. He painted the pigeon that was rejected one thousand times, and put one thousand times on a throne.”

Botero was born on April 19, 1932 in Medellín, Colombia. As a child he was enrolled by an uncle in a bullfighting school that he soon left, but it was a world captured later in his paintings. Botero decided at age 14 to dedicate his life to the arts, after managing to sell some sketches of bullfights to fans outside the city’s bullfighting arena. His mother supported the decision, but told him he would have to pay for his studies.

As a teenager, Botero participated in a group exhibition in Bogotá, and had his first individual exhibition there in 1951. In the following year, he went to Madrid to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.

From Europe, he traveled to Mexico to study the work of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

During his travels, Botero married Gloria Zea, with whom he had three children, Fernando, Lina and Juan Carlos. Returning to Bogotá in 1958, he was appointed professor at the School of Arts of the National University. He later divorced and took up residence in New York in 1960, where he arrived with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket.

In the 1960s Botero began experimenting with the volume of objects and people in his paintings. His original and plump creations attracted the attention of art critics and, by then, the painter had created hundreds of drawings as well as some 1,000 paintings.

Botero remarried in 1964 with Cecilia Zambrano, who he also later divorced. In 1970 they had a son, Pedro, who died four years later in a car accident in Spain. Botero captured the pain of his son’s death in the painting “Pedrito” that depicts his son riding a toy horse and wearing a blue police officer’s uniform. He also donated 16 works to the Museum of Antioquía, in Medellín, to honor the boy and in turn the museum named a room in memory of “Pedrito Botero.”

In the 1970s, Botero put aside painting and began to experiment with sculptures in bronze, marble and cast iron, which brought him great success. In 1978 Botero returned to painting, and then alternated between the two disciplines.

In his paintings, the artists depicted scenes of daily life, such as a family picnic or a party in an early 20th century ballroom. But he also tackled political subjects, like the death of drug dealer Pablo Escobar, or the emergence of rebel groups.

In 1995, his bronze sculpture “The Bird,” weighing more than 1.8 tons and displayed in a park in Medellín, was dynamited by unknown attackers, causing the death of 22 people and injuring more than 200.

In 2005, Botero created a series of 79 paintings that depicted U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, just a year after the incident came to light. The artist struggled to get the paintings shown in U.S. museums, but they were eventually exhibited at the University of California Berkeley, which still houses some of the paintings.