Carlos Amorales

Mexican artist Carlos Amorales combines traditional crafts and conceptual art in his works, which incorporate popular culture and subcultures. In his later projects he has also been using video, digital animations and vector drawing, working in association with graphic designers and musicians. Carlos Amorales studied art in Europe, where he attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam for three years from 1992. He continued his art education until the mid-1990s, when he became involved with performance art and some non-art-specific projects designed for public spaces. Carlos Amorales felt trapped by formal art processes and much preferred expressing himself through performance. In 1996 Carlos Amorales began creating a digital archive of photographic images that he modified to transform them into black silhouettes. He has made use of these in many of his collages, prints, paintings, installations, videos, sculptures and drawings. From 1999 to 2003 Carlos Amorales developed his performance art with a project that involved the Mexican version of professional wrestling, with the faces of all the participants hidden by masks showing his own facial features. This work gained him international recognition and was documented in a 2001 monograph published by the Artimo Foundation, Amsterdam. Carlos Amorales is a member of the National System of Art Creators in Mexico. He also teaches art to students in Amsterdam. (Artist website)