Mapping—geographies, movement, land, sea, individuals as vessels of time experienced. People, people, people also as networks—downloading! Interpretations of nature, flight as a means of drawing.
—Oscar Murillo
Oscar Murillo makes work that traverses painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, often inviting participation from members of the public in a testament to shared experience. His expressive, tactile abstractions are charged with painterly gesture, and his oeuvre probes ideas of collectivity and material presence, tracing the ways in which ideas, language, and objects are circulated and displaced.
Murillo was born in 1986 in La Paila, in the Valle del Cauca department of Colombia. At age ten, he moved with his parents to London, earning his BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London; the institution awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2023. He earned his MA in Fine Art in from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2012.
Murillo regularly involves others in collaborative processes that generate moments of collective energy. For his project Frequencies, initiated in 2013, he affixed raw canvases to desks in classrooms around the world, prompting students to express themselves both consciously and unconsciously through drawing and writing. The results were first shown in the 56th Biennale di Venezia exhibition, All the World’s Futures. The canvases have become an important source of inspiration for further works, including paintings, wearable sculptures, and animations.
In conjunction with Marks and Whispers, at Gagosian, Rome, Oscar Murillo and Alessandro Rabottini sit down to discuss the artist’s paintings and works on paper in the exhibition, as well as how the show emphasizes the formal, political, and social dimensions of the color red in Murillo’s work of the last decade.
Ahead of two exhibitions—The Flooded Garden at Tate Modern, London, and Marks and Whispers at Gagosian, Rome—curator Alessandro Rabottini visited Oscar Murillo’s London studio to discuss the connections between them.
In conjunction with Franz West: Papier, the gallery’s presentation of paper-based works by Franz West at Frieze Masters 2023, artist Oscar Murillo and arts writer, critic, and broadcaster Ben Luke sit down to discuss Murillo’s collaboration in selecting the works on view, as well as his personal experiences meeting the late artist in London.
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