When Botero, who lives in Paris and New York, first learned of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in May 2004, he followed the news with mounting outrage. Several months later, he began making sketches based on descriptions of the torture in the press. Over the course of a year, he produced some 80 paintings, drawings, and watercolors depicting naked prisoners bound, shackled, and shrouded in hoods and blindfolds as they are beaten, forced into chaotic piles on the floor, probed with broomsticks, and urinated on by American guards with ferocious attack dogs.

The pictorial space is tight and constricted; gray, gridlike prison bars appear in nearly all of the images. The palette is restricted, as well, to ochres, grays, and dull greens occasionally enlivened by dramatic touches of red that call attention to the prisoners' blood or the lingerie they were forced to wear as a form of humiliation. Many of the drawings are executed on handmade paper with a crusty texture that palpably evokes the foul conditions in the prison cells. In some pencil drawings, Botero added bloody smears and smudges of a rusty red chalk fittingly called "sanguine."