Whilst in Rome Morales experimented with a variety of different media and made paintings with oil, tempera, enamel, and dry pigments with a glue binder. By 1966 she had settled on working with acrylic paint for both her works on paper and canvas. The subsequent Roman paintings employ bold areas of colour which are laid down carefully by hand. The paintings were painted, like all of Morales’s work, in what she describes as an ‘analogue manner’. That is to say, she painted them by hand and with brushes, without the use of masking tapes, or any other mechanical methods of application. The surfaces of Morales’s paintings from this period are flat, and mainly unmodulated. Her hand—and how it moves when applying paint—is therefore barely visible in each of the different areas of colour. However, this is not the case in the shapes she employed within these early works. The round, irregular or circular outlines, the biomorphic forms, or the soft bands of colour that she used to compose these works, delicately reveal her hand gestures and have a natural quality, with some paintings seeming to hint at ideas of landscape, or indeed the contours and space of the human body. Morales’s early Roman paintings were well received, and exhibited in important solo exhibitions at the time, such as at the Galleria Alpha, Modena (1966) curated by Marisa Volpi, or at Arco d'Alibert (1967). In this exhibition, we have gathered a number of small works on paper from this period, as many of the canvases have, alas, not survived.
Morales describes her time making paintings in London, over two extended stays between 1967 and 1969, as a necessary means for her to lose, and shake off, what she feared was an old-fashioned type of classicism in her previous Roman paintings. In London, the forms in Morales’s work became more angular, geometric and taut. She came to the city having befriended the British sculptor Anthony Caro (1924-2013) whom she had met in Rome with the American colour field painter Kenneth Noland (1924-2010). On Caro’s invitation, and through her own tenacity, Morales soon became firmly ensconced in the London artistic scene, as she aligned herself to the colourful graphic formalism associated with Caro, the New Generation sculptors, and the pop-enthused abstract painters who had the year previously exhibited in the British Pavilion at the Biennale. Morales rented a studio space through Caro, a room to lodge in from Michael Bolus (1934-2013), and befriended painters such as Jeremy Moon (1934-1973), all of whom she would stay in close contact with after her departure.
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Paintings on paper, 1963-1967, variable techniques, variable dimensions
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674, 1967, 35x35 cm, tempera and acrylic on paper
