The BBVA Collection boasts significant works created in the 1970s and 1980s by the artist María Belén Morales, one of the most outstanding twentieth-century sculptors from the Canaries. She was also a pioneer in the development of non-figurative internationally-oriented art in the islands. Morales is also noted for her role in disseminating modernism in art in the Canaries and in raising awareness of the work of contemporary women artists.

At a time when women’s art education was generally restricted to the domestic realm—where contact with art was normally through a male figure in their personal circle—María Belén Morales decided to become a sculptor and to study art professionally.

Thus, in the 1950s she attended the School of Arts and Crafts and the School of Fine Arts in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Those were rather dark days for art in Spain, generally defined by profound cultural isolation. The artists from the Canaries developed their practices within academicist principles, mostly creating landscapes and indigenist scenes. Since her childhood, Morales moved within a culturally advanced artistic circle and sensed that there were alternative paths to develop modern art, adapted to the international reality of the time.

Key to reaffirming Morales in her approach was Eduardo Westerdahl (1902-1983), a painter, art critic and promoter of Gaceta de Arte, an art journal launched in 1932 and discontinued with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The magazine and Westerdahl himself, who had strong links with the European avant-garde, channelled the arrival of Modernism and Surrealism to the Canary Islands.

After her discovery of the work of artists like Óscar Domínguez (1906-1957) and her contact with figures like César Manrique (1919-1992), Morales reasserted her will to create a freer and more personal art. Morales’ work was always defined by her unbounded visual experimentation, which led her to explore Surrealism, to study the organic forms of nature— developing a sculpture language very much in tune with that of the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)—and to a heightened simplicity in forms. The result was the consolidation of an oeuvre underwritten by great formal and conceptual subtlety, akin to American . As an artist, Morales pioneered the emergence of a non- figurative language in the Canaries, and always remained active in the islands’ art scene notwithstanding the obstacles encountered by many women painters and sculptors.

She also encouraged the implementation and consolidation of a new abstract vocabulary in the Canary Islands, participating, in 1963, in the foundation of the Nuestro Arte group, made up by the artists Pepe Abad (1942), Manolo Casanova, Pedro González (1923), Eva Fernández (1911-2005), Jose Luis Fajardo (1941), Maribel Nazco (1928) and Manuel Villate. Nuestro Arte also included key art critics and historians like Enrique Lite, Miguel Tarquis and Antonio Vizcaya. The group championed modernism in art and the creation of an avant-garde art specific to the Canaries that would transcend the prevailing local orientation. This favoured the birth in the islands of a movement led by a group of artists and intellectuals who developed an abstract language in parallel to the opening of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca (1966), which marked Spain’s definitive opening to modernism.

Morales also contributed to the recognition of the work of other women artists of the time through the group exhibition 12, held in 1965. Organised in collaboration with Maud and Eduardo Westerdahl and Tanja Tamvelius (1901-1969), the exhibition showcased works by twelve women artists from various origins in the Círculo de Bellas Artes and the Instituto de Estudios Hispánicos. The exhibition was the first in the Canaries and the second in Spain to show works created exclusively by women, thus championing the role of women artists in Spain in the sixties.

A defender of progress, openness and modernism, through her own production and her role in various cultural initiatives, María Belén Morales fostered the emergence and development of the international abstract language in the Canary Islands. Her personal circumstances, together with a social and cultural milieu reluctant to accept the participation of women in the art scene, prevented her from gaining the international recognition enjoyed by other great artists from her generation. Notwithstanding, the quality of her three-dimensional practice confirms the importance of her sculpture within the overall context of twentieth-century Spanish art.

Image: © Archivo MBM - TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes

Castro Morales, F., González Reimers, A.L., Corredor-Matheos, J., Santana, L., y Areán, C., María Belén Morales: Núcleos [cat.exp.], Centro de Arte La Regenta, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria y Centro de Arte La Granja, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Gran Canaria : Viceconsejería de Cultura y Deportes , D. L. 2004

Documental "Imprescindibles", RTVE (2019)

Allen, J.: “María Belén Morales o la coherencia de una escultora”, en Canarias 7, Pleamar, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 18 noviembre 2004, p. III

Tinaut, Mª del Pilar: “Mujeres Canarias de hoy: María Belén Morales”, en Jornada, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 3 de noviembre de 1980, p.21