Born in Granada, Nicaragua, Armando Morales studied at the School of Fine Arts in Managua from 1948 to 1953. He traveled to Brazil and Peru where he he held his first individual exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Lima in 1959. Armando Morales moved to the US in 1969 as a Guggenheim fellow and studied at the Pratt Graphic Center. His work of the 1960's incorporated informalist abstraction with the use of canvas college. After 1968 he returned to a more representational style where figures were placed in semi-abstract metaphysical environments in which volume and background were integrated.