ART-PRESENTATION: Oscar Murillo,The Build-up Of Content And Information
Oscar Murillo’s large-scale paintings imply action, performance, and chaos, but are in fact methodically composed of rough-hewn, stitched canvases that often incorporate fragments of text as well as studio debris such as dirt and dust. His paintings, video works, and performances are tied to a notion of community stemming from the artist’s cross-cultural ties to Colombia, where he was born and diverse cities and places in which he travels and works.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Paintings and works on paper are on presentation in “the build-up of content and information”, Oscar Murillo’s first solo exhibition in Asia that is on show at David Zwirner Gallery in Hong Kong, Murillo was born in La Paila, Colombia, pursuing a better life, his entire clan immigrated to London, when Oscar was 10 years old. In the UK, he cleaned offices to put himself through art school. Murillo earned his BFA in 2007 from the University of Westminster in London and completed his MFA in 2012 at the Royal College of Art. After graduating, he worked as a teacher in a secondary school, but soon he quit his job and traveled to South America. After that, he dedicated himself to art entirely. Murillo is known for an inventive and itinerant practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled. In recent years, Murillo has traveled extensively throughout the world to research and prepare exhibitions and other projects, making works both in the studio and in unexpected locations. As a result, airplanes, which are able to move more or less freely and without regard to borders, and the contemplative isolation afforded by these long journeys, have become an important site of production for the artist. These notations, in turn, form the basis of Murillo’s large-scale canvases on view in this exhibition, which the artist considers to be his first show to present purely paintings. To make them, the artist first stitches together fragments of worked canvases that have been subjected to various processes in different locations, sometimes over the space of years. Through an associative working method, he then builds up layers of both found and invented imagery and phrases as well as gestural markings in intuitively placed planes, resulting in dense surfaces that at first glance appear abstract and even lyrical.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 19/9-3/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-9:00, www.davidzwirner.com
