OSCAR MURILLO: MARKS AND WHISPERS
Gagosian is pleased to announce Marks and Whispers by Oscar Murillo. The exhibition emphasizes the formal, political, and social dimensions of the color red in Murillo’s work of the last fifteen years.
April 12 - June 15
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.
Each work in Marks and Whispers stands as a marker, suggesting fragility, despair, vulnerability, and precariousness. Hung on freestanding walls, the paintings activate the gallery’s ovoid rotunda with complex sight lines, their surfaces layered with arresting hues of scarlet that hint at the anguish which underlies a world of privilege.
The exhibition begins with paintings from Catalyst, an ongoing series that Murillo began as a student in 2011. Each of these works is produced by saturating a skein of canvas with pigment, then laying a second canvas on top and using a long stylus to transfer marks from one surface to the other in an explosive full-body process.
Their surfaces embody the physicality of the act of painting, a palpable “manifestation”; imposing in scale, they are energized by the conviction and urgency of dissenting action. The compositions on view are thus materially interconnected, culminating in entries from Scarred Spirits, Murillo’s most recent series, presented here for the first time. A meditation on automatic and large-scale drawing, they contain a history of his studio practice and represent an evolution in his process.
Murillo’s interrogation of mark making continues in his Flight drawings, which incorporate repeated ink marks, letters, words, and numbers drawn by the artist while traveling across the globe. These works are characterized by a simplicity of means, their maker taking advantage of travel’s meditative lull to experiment with the possibilities of improvisation with a restricted range of tools.
From July 20 to August 26, Murillo will present a newly commissioned installation, The Flooded Garden, at Tate Modern, London, as part of the UNIQLO Tate Play program. Concurrent to the Rome exhibition, Murillo’s work is the subject of exhibitions at the Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.