Beatriz Morales

Beatriz Morales (*Mexico City, 1981) is an autodidact and multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice encompasses painting, textile installations, and video. Following a series of international exhibitions, interest in her work has grown continuously and steeply over the past years.

In her art, Morales utilizes a broad spectrum of techniques, most prominently facets of abstract-expressionist color-field painting and fiber art elements, weaving a symbiotic tapestry of materiality and conceptuality to explore questions of identity and its many layers. As Berlin-based Mexican artist with Lebanese ancestors, she investigates multinational and cross-cultural realities of being and expression. Her approach is amplified in the interplay of ruralism and urbanism, where each part serves as a constant backdrop to contextualize the other. Morales approaches nature not only as a source of pigments and fibers, but also as a natural habitat for her installations, which, presented in nature, blend in seamlessly with the surroundings that inspire them. Art and nature reflect and complement each other, the boundaries between natural organic presence and abstract composition dissolve.

For her signature textile works, Beatriz Morales revitalizes the fiber of the agave plant, a raw material of central importance in Mexico for millennia, until it was gradually replaced by synthetic materials in the course of the industrial revolution starting in the late 19th century. The artist reinterprets this natural fiber to transport an archaic force in her compositions and installations. The result is a symbiosis of fiber art, with its related associations of craft, local traditions and compositional gestures loosely in the tradition of North American abstract expressionism. The ongoing series of fiber works in various formats is subsumed under the title Ts’ul, a word from the indigenous Maya language spoken in the south of Mexico, from where the material itself originates. Ts’ul translates as “the other”, “stranger”, “foreigner”, offering further clues to the conceptional foundation unifying the many facets of Morales’ art.

Her work has been shown at Museo de la Cancillería Mexico City, Museo MACAY Mérida, Museo Rufino Tamayo Mexico City, Kunsthalle Dessau, Drexel Galería, Heart Ego Gallery and Circle Culture Gallery Berlin and Hamburg. Her last participation is related to the hight-profile group exhibition “The King is Dead, Long Live the Queen” at Frieder Burda Museum, Baden Baden, Germany. 

Morales’ exhibition itinerary this year features a group exhibition at Circle Culture Gallery Berlin, a solo show at Praxis Gallery in New York, another solo exhibition at Kunstverein Dresden, and an intervention at Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, USA, curated by Edenija Bannan. Her paintings and installations are held in private collections in Mexico, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Canada, and the USA and her works have been featured in numerous print and online publications such as her first major monography Color Archaeology published 2022 (by Kerber Verlag).

Beatriz Morales lives and works in Berlin and Hidalgo, Mexico.