Mujeres en el agua

Nicaragua’s preeminent painter and printmaker of the twentieth century, Morales evolved out of abstraction in the 1970s as his work took a metaphysical turn, exploring the reaches of “magical realism” in tropical landscapes, still lifes, and female nudes. A leitmotif of his practice, the female figure is both classically inspired—as seen in the shadowing and delicate cross-hatching of "Mujeres en el agua"—and assimilated within the natural world. Turned away from the viewer, the two women cast dark shadows that merge into the landscape, suggestively transporting them from the textured blue ground on which they stand into a metaphorical rain forest or jungle, mythical symbols of Latin America’s lost paradise. Working here within a limited, but complementary palette of ochers and blues, Morales intimates the absorption of the women within nature, the curved outlines of their bodies—conventionally modeled at left and improbably torqued at right—echoed in the lush, arching foliage.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Abigail McEwen.