Guerrillero Muerto VIII was part of a solo exhibition that Armando Morales held at the Pan American Union between March and April 1962, and it belongs to a series of thirteen works created between the late fifties and early sixties. Just like Prisionero electrocutado and other pieces of that period, the series refers to the violence that took place in Nicaragua at the end of the fifties under the dictatorship of Somoza. The group of works is comprised of grave and lugubrious pieces where the description of the political violence is not literal, but evoked through the quiet interweaving of large planes with different textures and demure, often somber, colors. Within those planes appear shapes that are suggestive of fragments of tortured and dismembered bodies. Stylistically, Morales’ work shows immediate signs of informalism, like that of Poliakoff and Afro. However, his art is also reminiscent of Robert Motherwell, who in his series Elegy to the Spanish Republic—linked to abstract expressionism—was able to capture the violent mood created by fascism during the Spanish Civil War through non-figurative works that came alive through the combination of title and the formal elements of the piece. Guerrillero Muerto VIII, in particular, presents the shroud of a dead guerrilla through the application of gauze on the canvas, a clear reference to the work of Italian artist Alberto Burri, whose work Morales studied while developing this painting. Political violence is suggested through the representation of a lacerated, perforated, and stitched body-fabric. Armando Morales was born in Granada and began his career at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Managua from 1948 to 1953, where he received the support of the director Rodrigo Peñalba for being an outstanding student. Immediately afterward he participated in the Second São Paulo Biennale, and in 1954 he received a prize in the Second Havana Biennial. After winning the 1956 Central American Painting Contest held in Guatemala for his work Árbol-Espanto, he was included by Cuban critic José Gómez Sicre in the Gulf-Caribbean Exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where he received another award for Jaula de pájaros. His relationship with Gómez Sicre was crucial to the internationalization of his career, and in 1957 he traveled to Washington, D.C. to participate in Six Nicaraguan Artists at the Pan American Union. From then on, his ties with the American scene strengthened. In 1959 Gómez Sicre organized a one-person exhibition at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo in Lima and gave him a slot at the Organization of American States (OAS) pavilion at the Fifth São Paulo Bienal, where he obtained the Ernest Wolf Prize for best Latin American artist. In 1960, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship (1958), he moved to New York, where he studied engraving at the Pratt Institute. In 1962 he held a solo exhibition at the OAS and also received a fellowship from the institution. In the following years, he traveled to Canada, France, Spain, and Italy, before later returning to New York where, without abandoning the corporeality of the impasto, his work became abstract, abandoning glazing and experimenting with greater delimitation and decidedly geometric planes. Around 1966, Morales returned to figurative painting. Female bodies, enigmatic swimmers, and virgin jungles headline a work that synthesizes classical drawing, eerie atmospheres, and finely orchestrated textures. In the eighties, he moved to Paris thanks to an honorary appointment as a diplomat. From there, he developed his work at the Galerie Claude Bernard, where he exhibited repeatedly until well into the nineties.