Untitled

Morales belongs to the emergent generation of Latin American artists who rose to international prominence while working in New York during the 1960s. Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship (1961) and a grant from the Organization of American States, he studied drawing and lithography at the Pratt Graphic Art Center, experimenting with compositional techniques that informed the abstraction of his contemporary landscape paintings. Morales characteristically worked in monochrome, and in "Untitled" he juxtaposes dark, free-form shapes with highly textured graphic marks that animate the image with tectonic intensity. This austere chiaroscuro evokes the drama of the Spanish colonial past, a subject that Morales treated in two important series from this time, "Guerrillero muerto" (Dead Warrior) and "Tauromachia" (Bull-Fighting). The specter of death, distilled in the black-and-white agitation of "Untitled", further implicates the degeneracy and corruption of the Somoza dictatorship, which ruled Nicaragua for over forty years.

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