Armando Morales

Miami Art Central, September 10 – November 7, 2004

This exhibition marked the first major U.S. survey of the work of renowned Nicaraguan painter Armando Morales, bringing together twenty-five oil paintings spanning more than five decades of his distinguished career. Morales's work traverses abstraction and figuration, exploring themes of femininity, animals, violence, death, and tropical landscapes. Influenced by literature and shaped by the cultural isolation and complex social and political realities of his native Nicaragua, his paintings transcend their physical subjects to offer metaphysical meditations on life.

Born in Granada, Nicaragua, in 1927, Morales's artistic journey took him from art school in Managua to New York, Paris, and London. However, the decaying colonial city of his childhood remains central to understanding his work; its surreal atmosphere and layered history are a constant, haunting presence.

Throughout his career, Morales has persistently investigated the essential principles of painting, using abstraction, figuration, and landscape to develop a highly personal visual language. His most iconic images are his classical nudes in dreamlike, ambiguous settings. In this exhibition, female figures appear bathing in coastal waters or reclining at the edge of forests. Their forms are rendered with the same deliberate attention given to objects in a still life. In works such as Three Bathers in the Forest (2003) and Bathers and Waterworks(2001), these women emerge from the shadows of his velvety brushwork like apparitions from memory, illuminated by the hazy light of nostalgia.

The exhibition features recent paintings, particularly Morales’s monumental rainforest scenes. These works are layered with beeswax to create haunting, tactile surfaces. These atmospheric compositions, such as Rain Forest and River (2002) and Tropical Rain Forest (Ravine and "Ojo de Agua") (2004), evoke secret, mythical landscapes filled with brooding intensity. In these works, trees appear as anthropomorphic beings, and dense vegetation seems to press forward, drawing viewers into shadowy, claustrophobic spaces. These jungles of secrecy and reverie are not only depictions of nature, but also psychological and emotional landscapes that speak to exile, memory, and the sublime. The poetic, metaphysical, and technically masterful works in this exhibition affirm Morales’s stature as one of Latin America’s most important modern painters.

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Armando Morales was organized by MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, and the Robert Miller Gallery, New York. It was presented at MARCO April – July, 2004, and at Miami Art Central, on September 10 - November 7, 2004. This presentation is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. In Miami, the exhibition was coordinated by Patricia García-Vélez.