Poker painting sells for $1.7 million
A painting depicting a strip-poker scene has sold for $1.7 million in a New York auction of Latin American art that took place earlier this week.
The auction, which took place at Sotheby’s, saw Fernando Botero’s piece sell as part of a variety of Latin artworks that collected $14 million in total.
Card Players II, Botero’s 1989 piece, depicts two men and two women in the middle of a strip-poker game. Both women are undressed, but the men are fully clothed and appear to be cheating. The painting is one of a series of Botero pieces focused on cheating.
The five foot tall work is thought to have been inspired by earlier gambling-based masterpieces such as Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players, which was painted approximately 100 years earlier, and Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps.
Botero, who has been painting, sculpting and drawing for several decades, describes himself as “the most Colombian of Columbian artists”.