Armando Morales, a prominent Nicaraguan artist and central figure in the Neofiguration movement in Latin America, said his artistic career began at the age of 11 at the completion of his first representational landscape painting. Morales first painted voluptuous fruits that resembled human flesh, then transitioned into painting the nudes for which he became famous. His mature work is characterized by his understanding of color, surface, and tonal variation—qualities he developed while studying at the School of Fine Arts in Managua under Rodrigo Penalba. In 1993, Morales completed an iconic portrait of the writer Gabriel García Márquez.