Alphabet of the Air

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Art · Subcategory: Urban art · Year: 2023 · Authors: María Belén Morales

Alphabet of the Air is the title of a mural located in the pedestrian passage named after the artist María Belén Morales Gómez (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1928-2016). It is a project long contemplated by the sculptor herself but never realised during her lifetime. 

The conceptual idea of the work arose in María Belén Morales’s mind during the 1990s, a time when her expressive language was consolidated around a series of forms she constructed by transforming flat silhouettes that fold until achieving more complex figures.

The mural was created in May 2023 by a group of Artistic Baccalaureate students from the IES de Ofra, a centre which since 2001 has also borne the name of María Belén Morales, and at the initiative of the Municipal Women’s Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

The artist’s heirs provided both sketches and documentation so that the students, assisted by their teachers, could complete this intervention which had remained only as sketches and tissue paper tests in the sculptor’s studio when she died in 2016.

Alphabet of the Air presents itself as yet another example of its author’s mastery of contemporary art and also serves as a link between two other sculptural works by María Belén Morales located very close by: Ida , on Reyes Católicos Avenue; and the tribute to Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente in La Granja park.

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