Colombian artist Fernando Botero, who gained worldwide fame with his sculptures and paintings of corpulent figures, has died at the age of 91.

His works feature outsized people and animals. But Botero also tackled politics and other serious subjects.

President Gustavo Petro called him “the painter of our traditions and defects, the painter of our virtues”.

The artist, who lived in Monaco, was suffering from pneumonia, his daughter Lina said on Friday.

Local media hailed Botero as the greatest Colombian artist of all time. His hometown, Medellin, has declared a week of mourning.

The son of a travelling salesman, Botero was born in 1932. In his 20s he travelled to Europe, where he discovered classical art before moving to the US.

He said that in the late 1950s he discovered “a new dimension that was more voluminous, more monumental, more extravagant, more extreme”.

“If I paint a woman, a man, a dog or a horse, I always do with this idea of the volume,” he told Spain’s El Mundo newspaper in 2014.

“I don’t paint fat women,” he went on. “What I do paint are volumes.”

Some of his more sombre works show Colombian guerrilla fighters and earthquakes.

In the 2000s he painted scenes depicting torture at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Any painting or sculpture by Botero sells for over $2m, according to Sotheby’s auction house.