Carmengloria Morales: An Abstraction of Withdrawal

This chapter focuses on the Chilean painter Carmengloria Morales (b.1942) and the importance of the debates she encountered in Rome in the 1960s on the subsequent development of her career. Morales is the only woman associated with Italian Analytical Painting movement of the mid 1970s, as well as an inaugural participant in the New York Radical Painting group of the 1980s. In the winter of 1969 in her studio in via Montoro in Rome, she developed her first Dittico (or diptych). These remarkable paintings reposition abstract painting as a conceptual and material practice. In doing so she abandoned her previous bright, colourful and relational formalist paintings, and started to develop a more extreme, reduced, and radical understanding of abstraction. The development of the Ditticos is intrinsically linked to the experience that Morales encountered in Rome, and her perception of the status and politics associated with abstract painting at the time. I suggest that these experiences were shaped through her joint friendships with the American artist Maricia Hafif (1929-2018) and the Sicilian painter Carla Accardi (1924-2014). Through a close reading of specific works, I demonstrate how these three pioneering artists shared vocabularies and ideas, even after Morales and Hafif had left Rome, and how aspects of Hafif’s own subsequent development, and her desire to “begin again” mirrors that of Morales.