Oscar Murillo

From September 17 through November 27, 2022, Oscar Murillo will stage a large-scale exhibition in the historic setting of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Venice. Titled A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise, the exhibition will include new paintings by Murillo, alongside an extensive, interactive presentation of Frequencies, the artist’s long-term, collaborative project with school students. 

Initiated in 2013, Frequencies has seen blank artist canvases fixed to classroom desks in over 350 schools worldwide. Students aged 10–16 are invited to freely draw on, write on, and mark the canvases over a period of 6 months, alongside their daily activities. The resulting canvases, with their accumulation of both conscious and unconscious markings, form a monumental collection of over 40,000 individual examples bearing the marks of hundreds of thousands of individual students.

Oscar Murillo has collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary on the public program ‘Dispersing towards being & becoming together: frequential reconfigurations’ to accompany this exhibition.
 
The program unfolds through four investigations; DISPERSAL, which reflects on the experience of the diaspora; CONVERGENCE, referring to the getting together and sharing of a struggle across differences and geographies; FRAGMENTATION, the recognition of difference in the common struggle; and RECONFIGURATION, evoking new senses of belonging.
 
The program features Phyllis Akinyi, Ekow Alabi & the drummers of joy, Archive Books (Leila Bencharnia, Wissal Houbabi, Omar Delnevo), Frank Báez, Blick Bassy, Maria Buenaventura, Clara Dublanc, Tanka Fonta, folkloric mashup from Mar, Rio, Cordillera, Oscar Murillo, Kettly Nöel, Saca Sal, Michelle M. Wright, and many more.
 
The preview will be September 16, 2022, from 6-8 PM. Learn more about the exhibition at A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise.

At Art Basel Parcours, which highlights artist interventions in the Basel city center and which takes place concurrently with the 2022 fair, Oscar Murillo’s Social Cataracts will be on view at the UBS Geschäftsstelle - Basel Aeschenvorstadt. Open to the public and co-presented with Carlos/Ishikawa, Kurimanzutto, and Taka Ishii, Social Cataracts is made up of two installations that touch on community, labor, and collectivity. 

The first installation, Mesmerizing beauty, 2022, consists of fifty vacant white plastic chairs, attached to which are wooden batons that appear to support placards typically used in political demonstrations but that in fact are works on paper and canvas based on drawings the artist has made during flights, traveling across continents. The second installation, Arepas y Tamales, 2022, features one hundred wearable sculptures. 

On Saturday, June 18 at 7PM at UBS Geschäftsstelle - Basel Aeschenvorstadt, Murillo will present a live public reading from the 1933 novela Parque Industrial: romance proletario (Industrial Park: A Proletarian Novel), by Patricia Galvão, a Brazilian modernist writer and dissident under the Vargas dictatorship. Part of Parcours Night 2022, the intervention complements the first presentation of Murillo’s installation Arepas y Tamales, giving the audience an opportunity to contemplate and be absorbed into the themes touched on by Murillo’s work. You can learn more about Arepas y Tamales here.

March 18–August 28, 2022

In Currents 121: Oscar Murillo, the Saint Louis Art Museum showcases new paintings created in the artist’s Colombian hometown, La Paila, where he has resided during the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout this time, Murillo channeled his artistic energy into the creative and physical act of painting. The resulting works—on view in the exhibition—are part of an ongoing series of large-scale paintings titled manifestation (2018–), characterized by bold, forceful swaths of bright blue and deep red paint obliterated by furious black marks made with an unmistakable physicality.

The works combine the traces of an individual’s act of painting, embodied in Murillo’s hand with a thoughtful, personal witnessing of world politics. For Murillo the idea of physical presence and gesture in painting is connected to the act of using one’s body to demonstrate dissent in the face of power. In fact, the term manifestation is used in several languages to describe political protest.

On Friday, March 18, from 12–1 PM, Murillo and Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, will discuss the paintings exhibited in a public conversation. This virtual program will take place via Zoom. To learn more and register for the artist talk at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Join Oscar Murillo and Olu Odukoya for a live conversation about their recent book, By means of a Detour, to be co-published by Kettle’s Yard and Kunstverein Hamburg later this year. This talk will be hosted and moderated by Carlos/Ishikawa.

Friday, December 4, 2020
Online | 3:00 PM GMT

Oscar Murillo’s current solo exhibition, News, is on view at David Zwirner Paris through December 19. Book your appointment here. 

Olu Michael Odukoya is a London-based creative director, publisher and curator. He is the founder of OMO Inc., a multidisciplinary creative agency that specializes in bespoke creative projects in the worlds of both contemporary art and luxury fashion. 

It has been announced that the Turner Prize 2019 has been awarded, for the first time in its history, to a collective bringing together the four nominated artists: Oscar Murillo, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Tai Shani.

The decision was made after the four artists contacted the jury to ask for the prize to be awarded to them as a collective, stating: “At this time of political crisis in Britain and much of the world, when there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity—in art as in society.”

Murillo was nominated by an independent panel of judges based on two recent exhibitions of his work: Violent Amnesia, at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, and Oscar Murillo l Zhang Enli, at chi K11 art museum, in Shanghai, as well as for his participation in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, We don’t need another hero, in 2018. The artist presents a new site specific installation of unstretched canvases and effigies in the Turner Prize exhibition.

Current exhibitions of Murillo's work include Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity, on view through January 26, 2020, at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Oscar Murillo: Social Altitude at Aspen Art museum through May 17, 2020, and HERE AND NOW: Transcorporealities, a group show at Museum Ludwig, Cologne through January 19, 2020.

November 23, 2019–May 17, 2020

At Aspen Art Museum, Oscar Murillo: Social Altitude presents a new body of work including large-scale paintings and a video. As a multisensory experience, the show is intended to mobilize visitors to actively engage with current cultural concerns—among them the social dynamics of globalization and the ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced and circulated in today’s world.

November 8, 2019, to January 26, 2020

Opening this month at Kunstverein Hamburg, for Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity, Murillo has transformed the museum’s main hall into an agora (or marketplace), reflecting his enduring belief in geographic, cultural, and sociopolitical solidarity. Large canvases from the artist’s manifestation series, which debuted at the London gallery this past June, will be presented along with examples of his effigies—human-scale stuffed figures that relate to the artist's ongoing reflection on the life of workers. As part of the exhibition, visitors are invited to sit on stepped structures similar to sports-stadium benches (also shown in London), which double as seating for the events programmed during the show and offer a vantage point from which visitors can survey the “agora” scene. The exhibition has been organized in cooperation with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England, where OSCAR MURILLO: Violent Amnesia was presented earlier this year. An artist’s book published by Kettle's Yard and Kunstverein will give an overview of Murillo’s practice in 2019, with prominence given to the artist’s solo exhibitions at the two institutions.

On the occasion of Manifestation, Oscar Murillo’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner in London, the artist was in discussion with his former teacher at the Royal College of Art, John Slyce, in the gallery. Their conversation explored the exhibition in the context of Murillo's wider practice and the present moment.

Tuesday, July 9, reception 6 PM; talk 6:30 PM
24 Grafton Street, London

After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Westminster in London, Murillo earned his M.F.A. in 2012 from the city’s Royal College of Art. A Mercantile Novel, his first exhibition with the gallery, was held in New York the following year. He is one of four artists shortlisted to win the 2019 Turner Prize based on two exhibitions of his work: Violent Amnesia, on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge through June 23, 2019, and Oscar Murillo l Zhang Enli, presented recently at chi K11 art museum, in Shanghai, as well as for his participation in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, We don’t need another hero, in 2018.

John Slyce is a writer and critic based in London. He has written extensively on the work of Sarah Sze, Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Carey Young, Cullinan Richards, Allen Ruppersberg, and Rodney Graham, among others, and is a regular contributor to art magazines and journals. Slyce has taught and lectured widely across the UK and Europe since the 1990s and is a Senior Tutor in Painting and Research at the Royal College of Art.

Concurrent with Manifestation, the artist’s solo exhibition at the gallery in London, Oscar Murillo presented recent works on paper in an Online Viewing Room titled Poetics of Flight.

Murillo’s recent work makes pointed reference to air travel, with airplanes having become an important site of production for the artist. In his own words, flight is “not just a means of travel but a sacred ‘other’ space, the aeroplane seat itself becoming a unique ‘studio’ at a remove, a non-place which is both physically confined and freed from being in any real geographical location.”

June 19–August 25, 2019

Oscar Murillo is showing newly commissioned works in Collision/Coalition, a two-person exhibition with Tony Cokes at The Shed in New York. Murillo’s presentation will make varied use of the large space devoted to his work, and will bring together paintings, drawings, and installations.

"What we are about to embark on for The Shed is engaging with the architecture of the space," Murillo says in a recent studio visit; "and also very much continuing an engagement with certain ideas that are much more socially connected." Collision/Coalition aims to explore "the role of art in the interaction of opposing social, cultural, and political forces." Murillo, who emigrated with his family from La Paila, Colombia, to London in the 1990s, uses his artistic practice to investigate notions of community as well as wider themes of globalization, production and consumption, and labor and migration. At The Shed, selected works from the artist’s Flight series, drawn during plane journeys, are born of his itinerant life and practice. As Murillo explains: "Flight becomes not just a means of travel but a sacred ‘other’ space, the aeroplane seat itself becoming a unique ‘studio’ at a remove, a non-place which is both physically confined and freed from being in any real geographical location."

As part of the installation at The Shed, suspended black canvas "flag" pieces similar to those shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015 continue The Institute of Reconciliation series initiated in 2014. As Anna Schneider writes in the publication accompanying Murillo’s 2017 solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, "His artistic strategy is to create emptiness and energy through the depth of the black pigment. Black, here, is a total abstraction that nevertheless encompasses every part of the world … the black canvases suggest emptiness and hiatus, seeking openness—and perhaps, yes, a reconciliation process."

A number of works in the manifestation series connect Murillo’s presentation at The Shed with his current solo exhibition at David Zwirner in London. Begun in 2018, this new body of work shows a marked evolution in the artist’s process. Building on a technique Murillo developed for his catalyst series, started in 2011, the manifestation works treat canvas as a form of ink pad, transferring pigment from one surface to another which is laid on top; as with many of Murillo’s works, different pieces are sewn together and painted on to create a collaged effect, juxtaposing the different energies contained in the painted layers. 

Murillo’s surge series, of which selected examples will be presented at The Shed, was also initiated in 2018. The artist embeds a range of signifiers into the surge compositions, some of which remain legible while others become completely obscured. Having built up layers of both found and invented imagery and phrases as well as gestural markings, Murillo applies a rush of undulating blues that conveys a sense of motion and depth across the surface of the canvas. This final layer references both the surge of energy used to make the works, as well as the ability of water to flow indiscriminately without regard to arbitrary constructs such as maps or borders. As such, these images conjure a utopian and cautionary vision of contemporary geopolitics.

Murillo discusses the manifestation works and the wider nature of his practice with Ben Luke in a recent edition of The Art Newspaper podcast.

April 9–June 23, 2019

Central to this major solo exhibition by Oscar Murillo was the first public presentation of a new painting created over a period of four years, from 2014 to 2018. Titled violent amnesia and measuring almost ten feet in height, this work adapts the format of Murillo’s well-known “banner paintings,” in which an unstretched canvas dangles loosely as though it were a flag—literally and metaphorically untethered from the traditional structures of painting. While previous banner paintings adhere to a palette of almost monochromatic black layered on in abstract shapes, violent amnesia incorporates recognizable imagery, including outlines of continents and pictures of birds. For Murillo, birds, which are able to migrate freely and without restriction, make for a significant contrast to the human experience; Murillo’s recent work has also made pointed reference to air travel, with airplanes having become an important site of production for the artist—in his own words, “not just a means of travel but a sacred ‘other’ space, the aeroplane seat itself becoming a unique ‘studio’ at a remove, a non-place which is both physically confined and freed from being in any real geographical location.” The title "Violent Amnesia," applied to the exhibition as a whole, reflects the artist’s interest in collective forgetting; in the museum’s description, these works express a "precarious relationship between anxiety and inertia."

The characteristically dynamic and diverse installation at Kettle’s Yard made use not only of the galleries themselves, but also the window on Castle Street, the adjacent St. Peter’s Church, the lower floor of the Kettle’s Yard House, and the research space, as well as areas between the galleries. Among the works on view was a new group of paintings from Murillo’s "catalyst" series (ongoing since 2011), examples of which were shown at David Zwirner in London in 2015. Presented for the first time in the U.K. was My name is Belisario, an audio installation featuring the artist’s father describing his experience of migrating from Colombia to London. The original narrative in Spanish was also available for visitors to listen to in English, Bengali, Arabic, and French—all languages that are spoken in communities in Cambridge (for the presentation of this work at Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2017, this work was similarly available in languages including German and Hebrew). As the artist explains in an interview with curator Osei Bonsu, "The desire is to continue the translation process so that it somehow has an ambition for it to continue to expand and to give the opportunity for a diversity of cultures, societies to maybe be aware of this story, and in it potentially find a kind of familiarity—particularly in the context of individuals living in Europe, or coming from ‘otherness.’"

Violent Amnesia also included a performance linking the gallery spaces. This element of the exhibition used similar materials to the artist’s performance at the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018, such as a black cape-like costume and rock-like baked sculptures. Titled through patches of wheat, corn and mud, the performance in Berlin featured industrial ovens that were used to produce loaves from a mixture of corn and clay, evoking notions of sustenance and consumption.

The exhibition at Kettle’s Yard was accompanied by public programs, including a conversation with Murillo, tours, talks, and performances.

Violent Amnesia marked the reopening of Kettle’s Yard after two years of renovation and expansion. A unique house museum with its own collection, Kettle’s Yard was founded by Jim Ede (1895–1990), who converted four cottages in Cambridge into a place to display his art collection. In 1966, Ede, who would conduct personal tours of the collection as well as lend paintings to students to hang in their rooms during semester time, donated the house and collection to the University of Cambridge.

March 22–May 31, 2019

Oscar Murillo | Zhang Enli at chi K11 art museum in Shanghai brought together recent works by Murillo alongside those of Chinese artist Zhang Enli. Born in Colombia and based in various locations, Murillo’s practice encompasses paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. This exhibition in Shanghai—the artist’s first presentation in Mainland China—includes examples of his flight # works, which were first presented at David Zwirner in Hong Kong last year. An itinerant artist who is often on the move between locations, Murillo uses "these moments and spaces of transition," as he has called them, to draw. He considers international flights to be "not just a means of travel but a sacred 'other' space, the aeroplane seat itself becoming a unique 'studio' at a remove, a non-place which is both physically confined and freed from being in any real geographical location. Within this space, during the proscribed periods of time each journey affords, I engage in notation, mark making, recording, layering gestural marks onto surfaces." 

Also among the works on view at chi K11 was Murillo’s room-sized installation The Institute of Reconciliation (2014–), an ongoing project that extends the artist’s engagement with the notion of belonging across different cultures. Prominently featuring hanging black canvases, iterations of this work have been shown at various locations, adapted by the artist each time to a specific site. In an interview with Sáez de Ibarra which is included in a major monograph about the artist, Murillo describes the intensive process of making the black canvases, which appear in various forms throughout his practice, and their significance: "It's like slow bleeding, clearing a passage by painting, ironing, folding, rubbing with a piece of black graphite. Those are all things you can do at home—tasks like sweeping or ironing—it's just that in this case they're done to black canvases, paying tribute to grief and mourning, but not to something specific. . . It's a manifestation of an attitude, which is larger than one’s own self . . . Right now it seems that in many parts of the world—or everywhere, even—there is a shroud of darkness . . . There is always a story under the surface, and those stories are often quite peculiar; they have a strange way of manifesting themselves." The artist’s acute awareness of community also informs collective conscience (2015–), a site-specific installation featuring human-scaled effigies in various states of degeneration and decay. These stuffed figures, which Murillo has recontextualized within various settings beginning in 2015, derive from a New Year's Eve ritual in his hometown in Colombia. On December 31, locally made effigies are burned in a bonfire as a cleansing ritual in anticipation of the new year. The work relates to the artist's ongoing reflection on the position of workers, implicated as both producers and consumers within a system that he sees as stagnating. As the press release for Oscar Murillo | Zhang Enli stated, such references "should be seen not as a call for localism, but a metaphor for the displacement and flow of objects and ideas in global capitalism." 

Oscar Murillo participated in two biennials in summer 2018: The 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and the 2nd Industrial Art Biennial in Croatia.

10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art 
June 9–September 9, 2018

Titled We don’t need another hero (after a Tina Turner song) and curated by Gabi Ngcobo, the tenth edition of the biennale was "a conversation with artists and contributors who think and act beyond art as they confront the incessant anxieties perpetuated by a willful disregard for complex subjectivities." In the courtyard of the Akademie der Künste, Murillo created an installation involving the industrial process of baking bread, evoking ideas around consumption and the basic sustenance of life.

Ngcobo and Murillo were in conversation at Haus der Kunst in Munich earlier this year as part of Capsule 07, a survey of new work by Murillo accompanied by a major publication.

2nd Industrial Art Biennial
July 21–October 28, 2018

The 2nd Industrial Art Biennial in Croatia, titled On the Shoulders of Fallen Giants, included Murillo’s The Institute of Reconciliation (2018). This work, based on previous installations, included twenty hanging black canvases and a group of twenty effigies on plastic chairs at the Temple of Augustus in Pula, Croatia.

In its various iterations, The Institute of Reconciliation pays tribute to "grief and mourning, but not to something specific," the artist has said, as "a manifestation of an attitude, which is larger than one’s own self."

In Jerusalem, as Mary Pelletier writes in Hyperallergic, the conflicted location took the work in a new direction: "As plans for Jerusalem Lives got under way, Murillo's approach to his black canvas work was changing. What had begun as a desire for intensity, rendered through experimentation with repetition and the possibilities of black paint, developed into a more site-specific practice."

In the artist's own words at the opening of the exhibition, "I thought it should not continue, that same kind of rhythm of existence in the studio, because something greater had happened. To just simply go back to the studio and to continue to make that work would just be to deny that experience. I don’t want the work to become transfixed into one singular kind of context."

Related Event:

Wednesday, February 21, 2018, 5:30–7 PM
Contemporary Art Talks: Oscar Murillo
Goldsmiths University, London

September 15, 2017–April 15, 2018

Capsule 07 was a major survey of new work by Oscar Murillo that was created specifically for Haus der Kunst. 

Synthesizing ideas Murillo had been developing over the previous four years, the exhibition featured whole room installations, integrating video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performative elements. Also included was a presentation of Murillo's ongoing Frequencies project—a collaboration between the artist and his family, the sociologist Clara Dublanc, and schools in different countries where children are encouraged to leave their marks on canvases that have been stretched over their desks.

A publication accompanying the exhibition features a foreword by the Director of Haus der Kunst, Okwui Enwezor, texts by Emma Enderby and Anna Schneider, and an interview with Murillo by Maria Belen Saez de Ibarra. Published by Haus der Kunst.

Frequencies is a long-term project conceived in collaboration with members of Oscar Murillo's family and political scientist Clara Dublanc. Begun in 2013, the project sends pieces of raw canvas to schools around the globe with the sole requirement that they be affixed to desks for a year and illustrated by students. After that year, Murillo re-collects the canvases. To date, hundreds of students aged primarily 10 to 16 in schools on five continents have participated.

In 2015, David Zwirner Books published a book designed by Olu Odukoya documenting the first year of this ongoing project. The publication details the participating students and the many steps of the project, including the arrival of the canvases at schools, affixing the fabric to desks, the students working, and the final illustrations.

Read more: David Zwirner Books Editorial Director Lucas Zwirner describes the project in Cultured magazine. Learn more about Frequencies at frequenciesproject.net

For Printed Matter's 2016 New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, Oscar Murillo presented Room Services in collaboration with Yutaka Sone and Mandy El-Sayegh. The live multi-day drawing and printing performance centered around three workstations where the artists created graphic works, editions, books, and zines.

Posters from the project are available from David Zwirner Books.

Oscar Murillo's presentation at the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World's Futures debuted a large installation of canvases from his ongoing Frequencies project. Murillo also presented signalling devices in now bastard territory, a series of 20 black canvases each hung from a single hook and extending 30 feet from the floor to the ceiling of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini.

For Performa 15, Oscar Murillo presented lucky dip, an installation and live work at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green in New York, located at the southern edge of lower Manhattan.

On the building's exterior, Murillo installed a banner with the logo of Mighty White, a South African corn brand. Inside, performers ground and re-packaged corn, acknowledging the building's history as a hub for international trade and distribution. Throughout the week-long performance and installation, workers sang Spanish ballads and read from passages about town criers in London's markets, drawing further connections between the space and artistic and industrial production.