Oscar Murillo

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. Another focus in Murillo’s practice is the social dimension that occupies the border between events and performance. In 2012, he threw a party for the cleaners at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and in 2014, he brought Colombian factory workers to operate their own chocolate production line in a New York gallery. He has walked through New York and traveled between British cities carrying Mateos (traditional Colombian papier-mâché figures) and held a runway performance that showcased his wearable sculptures in Venice in 2022. Further key presentations of Murillo’s work include the 2019 Turner Prize exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate, England, in which he showed collective conscience (2015–), an installation centered around twenty life-size papier-mâché figures seated in church pews, their distorted yet playful forms evoking industrial workers. The four shortlisted artists—Murillo, Helen Cammock, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Tai Shani—were collectively awarded the Turner Prize that year. In 2024, inspired by the paintings that Claude Monet produced while suffering with cataracts, Murillo created the participatory installation The flooded garden for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. Also in 2024, Masses at Wiels, Brussels, featured an installation incorporating plastic chairs, sculptures made from cement and corn, drawings executed on plane journeys, a film shot on New Year’s Eve in Colombia, and a set of paintings titled Disrupted Frequencies —all of which reflect the artist’s ongoing curiosity about social and economic exchange, community, and collaboration around the globe.