Morales first visited New York in 1979, and that year she attended the initial meeting of the Radical Painting group, that Marcia Hafif hosted in her SoHo studio. Now independently, and after an absence of ten years, Hafif and Morales’s practices again converged. Both artists, each in a different way, found a new radicality in a reduced or essential form of painting. For Morales colour became an increasingly significant element which she reintroduced into her work. Initially limiting herself to a palette of red, yellow and blue, Morales explored the physical ways pigment and colour are held in paint, and how colours visually and formally interact with each other and reflect on historic and poetic associations. Morales’s specific choice of colour can be seen to nod to the early modernism of De Stijl and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), and to answer the challenge that New York painter Barnett Newman’s (1905-1970) series of four huge canvases (Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue) posed in the late 1960s.
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Carmengloria Morales: Rome, London, Milan, New York, Sermugnano, 2024, installation view at the BSR
