Oscar Murillo

These shroud-like sheets of cloth cover other questionable existences, alluding to a catastrophic reality, intangible in time, place, and history.
—Oscar Murillo

Gagosian is pleased to announce Marks and Whispers, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and a film by Oscar Murillo, opening at the gallery’s Rome location on April 12, 2024. The exhibition emphasizes the formal, political, and social dimensions of the color red in Murillo’s work of the last decade.

Murillo is known for expansive canvases, constructed from stitched-together elements, which incorporate elements of gesture, text, and studio detritus. He also produces books, drawings, sculptural installations, and videos that deconstruct and map flows of populations, power, and resources in currents of globalization and cultural exchange. Through each strand of his practice, Murillo probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, and demonstrates a commitment to the power of material presence.

Each work in Marks and Whispers stands as a witness, suggesting fragility, despair, vulnerability, and precariousness. Hung on freestanding walls, the paintings activate the gallery’s ovoid rotunda, their surfaces, layered with arresting hues of red, hinting at anguish in a world of richness. Veil-like layers of delicate cloth shroud their mirroring sides, reflecting the intense labor of painting and transforming the walls into vessels of subdued memory.