Armando Morales Biography

Born in his hometown, Morales moved at an early age with his family to the capital, Managua. It was during this time that he began showing an interest in art, as he started painting imaginary landscapes at the age of 11. He studied at the School of Plastic Arts in Managua, learning from teachers like Augusto Fernandez, the German Rechmitzy, and Rodrigo Penalba, who introduced him to his friend José Gómez-Sicre (1916-1991), a Cuban lawyer and art critic. At the age of 19, he was awarded a scholarship to study in the United States, but the trip was postponed due to lack of additional funds. Starting from 1959, he participated in several international exhibitions in the Americas and Europe, where he received several awards.

Upon arriving in New York, Morales was influenced by the abstract trend of American and European artists of the time. Around 1966, he shifted from abstraction to figurative art, painting tropical landscapes and the human figure while still incorporating contemporary elements (impressionist color palettes, texture, and mysterious backgrounds). According to the magazine En Exclusiva, Morales’s style was described as:

The combination of the contemporary with elements of his homeland forms his personal style, a truly unique style that belongs to him alone. When a connoisseur stands before one of his paintings, they can immediately recognize it as unmistakably Morales.

In 1972, he worked as a painting professor at the Cooper Union in New York and later became the cultural attaché of the Nicaraguan Consulate in the city. Morales lived and worked in this city for many years, making numerous trips to Europe and Latin America. In 1982, he moved to Paris. The following year (1983), Morales met the gallery owner Claude Bernard (one of the most recognized figures in the art world), who became his main representative. With this gallery owner, Morales had solo exhibitions at the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris and at the FIAC and Art Miami fairs. Morales also exhibited in major museums in Lima, Bogotá, Caracas, and Mexico City, among others.

Regarding his own work, Morales stated:

Even if my paintings don’t have the bright, flashy colors that are associated with the idea of Latin America, they are very Latin American in their approach to painting and their themes. The fact that I work on my paintings in Paris, London, or Nicaragua is circumstantial. They are always my still lifes, my nudes, and my jungles.

Furthermore, when it comes to his working environment, he affirmed:

I prefer to avoid everyday life situations, watching television or reading newspapers. I have a storehouse of images, and the cleaner it is of trash, the more likely useful ideas will remain there.

Maria Dolores G. Torres, a professor, critic of visual arts and photography, described him as follows:

Morales, besides being an exceptional painter, was a great draftsman, watercolorist, and printmaker, dedicating himself full-time to his art, painting tirelessly until the end of his days. Looking at Armando Morales’s bullfighting scenes, it occurs to me that the bullfighter’s struggle with the bull became the artist’s personal struggle with painting: a kind of ritual only interrupted by death.

One of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s comments in the Prologue of the catalog for the 1992 International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris asserts about the artist:

Armando Morales is capable of painting anything, any moment, any feeling, without subjecting it to the servitude of any fashion. He is a realist of a reality that only he knows and that can be from the 16th century as well as the 21st century: the subject determines the mode.