Carlos Amorales was born in Mexico City in 1970. Between 1992 and 1995 he attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam where, from 1996, he continued his studies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. He debuted around the mid nineties with performance projects, some conceived for public spaces that were not art-specific.

In 1996 he began a series of reflections and actions on Lucha Libre (the Mexican version of professional wrestling) and between 1999 and 2003 developed the performance cycle Amorales Vs Amorales, organising actual wrestling bouts in which the wrestlers wore masks with the artist's features. His first international recognition came with this work which was presented on various occasions: Migros Museum in Zurich, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Auditorium of Tijuana (Mexico), Wyndham Emerald Plaza Hotel in San Diego, SESC Pompéia in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern in London.
In 2001 the developments of Amorales Vs Amorales were documented in a monograph (Amorales Vs Amorales, publisher Artimo Foundation, Amsterdam 2001) in which the author writes about the sense of claustrophobia aroused in him by the formalisation processes of art, supplying an interpretive key to his choice of expressing himself through the (ephemeral) practice of performance.

In the same years he began his Archivo líquido (Liquid Archive), a digital archive of vector images (with modifiable traces) in ongoing expansion, from which he draws for each new work. They are photographic images taken from books, magazines, downloaded on internet or shot by the artist himself, transformed into black silhouettes and mostly modified through hybridisation processes. Translated into works they become videos, installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings, collages and prints. With the Liquid Archive Amorales manages to unite, in a surprising and wholly original way, the idea of fluidity (expression of freedom of movement and thought) with the aesthetic but also existential desire to create images capable of synthesising ideas and desires (which, thus formalised, can speak to others).

Between 2003 and 2008, with musician Julián Léde and designer Andre Pahl, he was involved in the project Nuevos Ricos, a series of works through which he immersed himself in the Mexican punk rock scene and which included setting up a record label and organising concerts (www.nuevosricos.com).
In 2005, on the occasion of creating the video animation Manimal, Amorales opened a new studio in Mexico City which has since become a place of study and a community of experts (graphic designers, curators, musicians). An experiment that confirms the artist's interest in conceiving the work of art as a language or heritage which others can utilise and interpret.
The spine-chilling running of a wolf that appears in Manimal evokes the state of terror which analysts such as Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck assign to present day society. The same themes are reflected in other of Amorales' works - Why Fear the Future? (2005), Broken Animals and Useless Wonder (2006) - and also in some of the symbolic values he assigns to the images in his Liquid Archive.
But what prevails in Amorales' work is a bursting visionary charge, the imaginative vitality with which he creates powerful images, usually fruit of a hybridisation process and always poised between different, sometimes conflicting interpretations. "I'm interested in what doesn't exist," he has stated, "the more obscure, emotional and poetical side of life."

Since 2008 Amorales has been a tutor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and member of the Mexican National System of Art Creators.
His most recent solo show venues include Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, (2010), Cincinnati Art Center and Orange County Museum between 2008 and 2009, Philadelphia Art Museum (2008), Daros-Latinoamerica in Zurich (2007), MALBA in Buenos Aires (2006), MUCA Campus, Mexico City (2006) and the Casa de America, Madrid, (2005).

He took part in the Havana Biennale in 2009, New York Performa in 2007, the Berlin Biennale in 2001 and the Venice Biennale in 2003 (Dutch pavilion).

His works are in the public collections of, among others, Tate Modern, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Daros-Latinoamerica, Zurich, Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, Museum Boijmaans van Beunigen, Rotterdam and the Fundación/Colección Jumex in Mexico.