Invited artist:Lorena Morales

I am interested in the relationship between personal and collective experiences, stories and contexts, challenging the viewer to further explore the positive and negative feelings surrounding home.

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Memory Keeper: A night in Maracaibo refers to perception of home and persistence of memory. Maracaibo is my birth city in Venezuela. In this work, I share with the viewer a glimpse of a personal memory, a cherished one, that is somehow distorted, the way a memory may be when it is just out of reach. It is an abstraction of a cityscape at night contained in the acrylic rod, surrounded by a vintage wallpaper with abstract flowers that could relate to that memory.With this work, I want to invite the viewer to get closer, to move up and down, to wonder about that memory.

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Lorena Morales is a multidisciplinary visual artist currently based in Houston, Texas, USA. Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Morales holds certificates in painting and sculpture from the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, as well as a degree in Business Administration. She completed the Block XIX Program at the Glassell School of Art, and was also awarded a grant by the Carlos Cruz-Diez Foundation and the Glassell School of Art for participation in an Advanced Seminar in Contemporary Art. She was one of the selected 2021/22 Artists-in-Residence at the L’AIR Arts Research Residency in Paris, France. In 2023, she joined the hybrid art residency “Mar Adentro” at Puertas Adentro in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

Morales’ work has been exhibited in Art Galleries, Non-profit organizations and Art Museums extensively in Texas, as well as nationally and internationally, in Venezuela, France, Uruguay and Germany. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston (since 2016), City of Houston’s Civic Art Collection, George Bush Intercontinental Airport (2021) as well as in many other public and private collections. More recently, Morales was selected as the 1st Place winner for The Wendy Wagner Foundation 2024 Fall Trio Creative Grant.

Lorena Morales work is represented by Hooks-Epstein Galleries in Houston, Texas and Contemporaneo Gallery in Asheville, NC.

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