Andrea Wild Botero is more than a famous name in the circles of the art world with her company ‘Artemisia’ being regarded as Latin America’s Christie’s or Sotheby’s.
Artemisia is a curated, online marketplace for Mexico-based art collectors who are in constant search of growing, evolving and nurturing the collections they’ve built with time and love. All the works one will find in Artemisia’s collection have been consigned by private collectors and are physically in the country.
Born in Colombia, Wild Botero lived in Mexico City between the ages of three and 18 when she left to study art in New York and London. But she always had a soft spot for Ancient Greek history and its influence on art in general, hence her company’s name.
Her love for art and art history comes from her family’s heritage with her grandfather being Colombian artist Fernando Botero who fell madly in love with her grandmother, the famous Greek sculptor Sophia Vari.
Following in her grandmother’s footsteps, at just 31 the mum-to-be has worked for galleries as diverse as Acquavella in New York, Blain/Southern in London, and Gmurzynska in Zurich, returning to her hometown of Mexico to find a bustling contemporary art market.
After working for the Museo Tamayo for a year-and-a-half, Botero started Artemisia, seeing a hole in the market when it comes to direct sales between collectors.
“It’s something that’s very established in the United States and Europe, but it was missing in Mexico,” Wild Botero told the acclaimed W Magazine that featured her as one of the women spearheading Mexico’s cultural renaissance.
“If you wanted to sell an important piece, you had to send it to Christie’s or Sotheby’s in New York. There is a boom happening here, and it’s not just about the top tier of the art world. There is a whole new group of people who want to learn more about art,” she enthused, adding that she plans to bring big-name exhibitions to Mexico from around the world.
Botero named her company after the controversial Artemisia I of Caria, a Greek queen of the ancient Greek city-state of Halicarnassus and of the nearby islands of Kos, Nisyros and Kalymnos within the Achaemenid satrapy of Caria in about 480 BC. She is mostly known through the writings of Herodotus who praises her courage and the respect in which the Persians held her.