Angel Botello

Angel Botello (1913-1986) was a Spanish-born painter, printmaker, and sculptor who lived and worked across Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. He was born on June 20, 1913, in Cangas do Morrazo, in the Galicia region of northwestern Spain. In the 1920s, his family relocated to France, where he commenced his formal artistic education, enrolling in 1930 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He returned to Spain in 1935 to continue his studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.

His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Botello enlisted as a cartographer and engineer for the Republican Army, serving until the conclusion of the conflict in 1939. Following the war, he left Spain and joined his family in France before emigrating to the Dominican Republic later that same year. In the Caribbean, he concentrated on painting, depicting local landscapes, residents, and cultural life. In 1944, he traveled through Mexico, where he met and exchanged ideas with Mexican muralists, before relocating to Haiti, where he lived and worked until 1953.

Botello settled permanently in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1953. Over the next three decades, he developed a substantial body of work that encompassed oil paintings, linocuts, lithographs, and bronze sculpture. His figurative subjects included family members, women, children, and dancers, rendered in a stylized, modern aesthetic. In the 1960s, he established his own bronze casting foundry in Puerto Rico to produce large-scale sculptures.

Botello died on October 25, 1986, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the age of seventy-three. Following his death, his artwork has been preserved and presented in public institutions internationally. His works are represented in public museum holdings, including the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio, and the Fresno Art Museum in California.