Oscar Murillo

A song to a tearful garden is Oscar Murillo’s site-specific, collective painting in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, on view during the Bienal from September 6, 2025 to January 11, 2026.

 
Visitors to the Bienal will encounter curved scaffolding structures positioned either side of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, each with a wall of canvas and art materials present, allowing the public to create a series of large-scale paintings. Every week, the public's marks will create an index of painted layers, providing a place of reflection against a backdrop of cosmopolitan energy.

This follows other recent large-scale participatory works, including at the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial in 2024, where Murillo invited crowds to make marks upon a painted black canvas stretched against a vast 80 meter-long scaffolding structure on the Abu Dhabi waterfront; at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, where his recent solo exhibition featured a “collective” mural painted by the public on the museum’s free-admission days; at his current solo show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, where canvases made by visitors fill the central atrium of the museum; and, notably, at Murillo’s 2024 solo presentation at the Tate Modern in London. There, the artist transformed its famous Turbine Hall into The flooded garden, where visitors were invited to paint water and waves onto a monumental wall of canvas to create a layered, collaborative painting of epic proportions.

Like several other such participatory presentations, A song to a tearful garden took inspiration from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series and the garden in which he painted them. Situated within this duality of nature and urban modernity, the canvases bear witness to the idea of darkness haunting a harmonious surface. This is a frequent concern in Murillo’s work, often alluding to the biography of Monet and his infamous Water Lilies, created in spite of the artist’s debilitating loss of vision.

Ahead of the installation of A song to a tearful garden at São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, Murillo invited friends, family, and members of the public to form the painting’s base layer in a series of drawing sessions held around the world. Canvases traveled to São Paulo across the Atlantic from throughout Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in a celebration of collective spirit anchored by the exercise of mark-making, a process Murillo refers to as social mapping.

These ideas of collective energy are mirrored in the artist’s Mesmerizing Beauty installation, presented inside the Bienal pavilion. The work comprises a series of oil-painted seascapes on cardboard, with traces of their former life as traded goods visible beneath Murillo’s gestural marks. Propped up by vertical lengths of wood and secured to disposable plastic chairs, the installation manifests a sense of dissonance echoing the poetic aspirations of the public participation unfolding outside.