20th-21st Century. Spanish

Born into a family of artists, María Belén Morales was familiar with the world of art from a very early age. Her first encounter with sculpture was in the studio of her uncle Enrique Cejas Zaldívar (1915-1986), where the young Morales discovered her passion for materials and modelling. She went on to study at the School of Arts and Crafts and at the School of Fine Arts in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where she received a formal academic education with a major focus on indigenous subject matters.

Her inquisitive personality, coupled with an interest in renewing and updating the art scene of the Canary Islands, led her to explore different paths in her search for new visual initiatives in the field of abstraction. Key in this quest was her instrumental role in 1963 in founding Nuestro Arte (Our Art), a group of artists who championed a freer and more emotional approach to art, removed from the aesthetic tradition then prevailing in the Canaries.

Since 1949 she was connected with the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Santa Cruz de Tenerife as secretary of its Sculpture Section, and then later vice-president and president from 1987 to 1990. In 1993 she was also active in setting in motion the no longer active Fundación Óscar Domínguez in the town of Tacoronte, in Tenerife.

Her sculpture evolved from delicate figuration to pure . However, this change in her practice took place organically as a result of her ongoing research into form and matter. In the 1970s, fascinated by speed, industry and the first space missions, she created a series of reliefs called aeroevasiones, in which she started to explore the tensions between straight and curved lines that would define her following formal experimentation. In the 1980s, inspired by the organic forms of nature, her practice shifted towards greater openness and expansion. Little by little, her work became simpler, leading to geometric pieces divested of all figurative reference. This period was defined by formal purity and a consummate control of materials. Her sculptures from this time are the very epitome of lightness, weightlessness and balance. Created with planes of geometric and linear surfaces tending towards verticality and the infinite, these works also feature a lacquered finish of pure flat colours reminiscent of US minimal sculpture.

Appointed a member of the San Miguel Royal Academy of Fine Arts of the Canaries, and a member of the advising committee of the Instituto Óscar Domínguez de Arte y Cultura Contemporánea (IODACC) from 2000 to 2002, María Belén Morales is one of the most outstanding exponents of abstract sculpture in the Canary Islands.