Carmengloria Morales (born in 1942 in Santiago, Chile) titles her paintings with a series of numbers and a letter. When working on canvas the number indicates the year, month and day that the work was started. When the painting is on paper, the number indicates when the work was finished. The letter, however, indicates the place where Morales made the work, whether city or village. Morales grew up and studied art in Milan. In 1960, she moved to Rome, where her professional career began. After her move, she divided her time between both Italian cities, before traveling twice for extended periods to London in the late 1960s. She then settled on a working pattern that took her predominantly between studios in Milan, New York, and the village of Sermugnano in Italy. The peripatetic nature of Morales’s practice, captured in her titles in such a beautifully understated way—with the simple prefixes R, L, M, NY, and S—illustrates both the rigor and continuity of her project and its international connections. Indeed, to fully understand the significance of Morales’s paintings, one needs to appreciate how her interest in the language of painting relates to these different shifting contexts.
In Rome, Morales began to make large colourful abstract paintings and build a supportive network. In 1963, she sold her first painting to one of the country’s most renowned artists, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968). She developed lasting friendships with many of the other artists working in the city, most notably with Carla Accardi (1924-2014) and Marcia Hafif (1929-2018), both of whom had, like Morales, begun to turn towards abstraction in their own work. Like many European artists of her generation, Morales was inspired by the scale and audacity of recent American painting, and in particular by the works of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), which she saw exhibited in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1962. However, she was also drawn to more contemporaneous discourses. Together with artists like Accardi and Hafif and writers associated either with Mara Coccia’s gallery Arco d’Alibert or those showing with the Galleria della Tartaruga near Piazza del Popolo, she sought—through a competitive atmosphere of talks, panels and discussions—to re-think the connections between European and Mediterranean culture and ideas of post-war modernity.
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Carmengloria Morales: Rome, London, Milan, New York, Sermugnano, 2024, installation view at the BSR
