Collection

Painter, draftsman, installation artist, and teacher. Morales first studied drawing, painting, and composition under Ethel Katz at the Art Students League of New York. In 1964 he moved to Spain and studied drawing at the Academia Peña and at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The following year he went to France and entered the American College Abroad and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. As a recipient of a Ford Foundation grant, he once again attended the Art Students League of New York and studied sculpture under José DeCreeft and painting under Julian Levi. He has taught drawing and painting at the Art School of the Museo del Barrio and at Boricua College, where he was artist-in-residence in 1985. His dramatic compositions present, sometimes with irony, disturbing images of Puerto Ricans’ social situation, including the syncretism characteristic of the people of that society. He is interested in exploring issues related with failures of communication, isolation and solitude, and violence in the contemporary world. Formally, his work, in all the media and genres he works in, reflects great technical and conceptual mastery.