Armando Morales was born in Granada, Nicaragua. Two years later, the family moved to Managua, the Capital. In 1956, he participated in the Central American Painting Contest “15 de Septiembre” held in Guatemala and won first prize with his painting Spook-Tree. This painting was later bought buy the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1957, the exhibition “Six Nicaraguan Artists” was inaugurated in Washington. Morales Received excellent reviews and sold all the paintings with which he had participated.In 1966 he won the “Industrial Tandil” Prize at the III American Biennial in Cordoba Argentina. In October of that year, Morales Returned to New York to Live in A studio apartment on the west side. In 1970 he painted lush and sensual fruits, heavy and voluptuous apple and pears that evoked the softness of human skin, from which there was the obvious transition to the painting of nudes. In his 1971 Exhibition at the Galeria Bonino in New York, he showed a series of stunning nudes; the fine detail of every muscle, every inch of skin revealing an unsurpassed sensuality.
Morales returned to Central America in 1976, intending to live in his own country, but political turbulence obliged him to move to Costa Rica. In 1977, he returned to the work of lithographs, having made several editions in New York and Berlin. He produced a series in black & white for Herbert Kassner of Lithographic Editions at the Kryon Editions Workshop Mexico City.
In 1982, Morales traveled to Nicaragua where the Sandinista government awarded him the order of Ruben Dario. He took advantage of the trip to visit the tropical jungle of the Atlantic coast and part of Bluefields. The Nicaraguan government named him an Alternative Delegate to UNESCO.
In 1993, he completed a portfolio of lithographs entitled The Saga of Sandino at the workshop of Artegrafias Limitadas, S.A. in Mexico City. Sandino was a Nicaraguan national hero whom Morales remembered seeing in Managua during his childhood. While in Mexico City, he also finished a portrait of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A year later, the lithographs were exhibited at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City and at the Institute of Graphic Arts in Oaxaca, where Morales also Held a conference on the occasion of the exhibition. He then went to Guadalajara for the inauguration of the Julio Cartazar Chair at the University of Jalisco. He was also Appointed juror for the Exposicion Pinturerias organized by the Cultural Foundation Artencion, Mexico City.
