Emma Enderby: Meaning Belongs to People

With a body of powerful paintings, dynamic installations, and hauntingly poetic video works, Oscar Murillo has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s leading voices. Published on the occasion of Murillo’s 2017 solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, this volume—the first dedicated overview of his career to date—presents the artist’s multifaceted practice from every angle.

Meaning Belongs to People
Emma Enderby

When Charles Baudelaire famously coined the term “modernity,” could he have foreseen that this new world of transitions, ephemeralities, and ruptures would not only define an age, but also presage its acceleration? Theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman maintain that the contemporary era is just a continuation of modernity—a radical state of late modernity—with an increased circulation of information, goods, money, images, travelers, and immigrants, as well as a spiraling global hypermobility. If alive today, Monsieur G.—Baudelaire’s celebrated street-wandering painter—would be a heightened form of observer, an active member of the geographically fluid whose practice was both created from and a response to our current state. Oscar Murillo is such an artist.

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Image: Oscar Murillo, (untitled) ética y estética, 2020 (detail)