Oscar Murillo (artist)
Oscar Murillo (born 1986 in La Paila, Colombia) is a Colombian artist working within the painting tradition. He currently lives and works in London.
Murillo’s solo exhibitions include Yarat Contemporary Art Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan (2016-7); Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá; Centro Cultural Daoíz y Velarde, Madrid; Performa 15, New York and Artpace, San Antonio (all 2015); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2014) and South London Gallery (2013).
The artist has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions and biennials, including the Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017) and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).
Critic Legacy Russell has said that the artist explores 'the body in transit', while curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has spoken of a ‘blurring […] between art and life’ occurring in Murillo’s multidisciplinary works.
Murillo was born, and spent the first ten years of his life, in La Paila, a small town in the Valle del Cauca Department of Colombia. His parents moved to London when he was 10 years old and knew no English.
In 2007, Murillo earned his BA.(Hons) in Fine Art at University of Westminster. After graduating, he worked as a teacher in a secondary school. He soon quit his job and traveled to South America with his wife, Angelica Fernandes, whose family is from Venezuela. In 2012, Murillo graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, with an MA in Fine Art. Living in East London, he often worked as an installer for the neighborhood’s small galleries.
Murillo's studio-based works are fundamentally tied to the environment where he produces them:
‘I came to the realisation that I was interested in too many things at once. Somehow the studio floor was the only available tool to communicate these interests. […] One tutor from art school once said that the was I made work, or treated the studio, reminded her of when she was going up in post-war Britain because then there was this idea that you had to be resourceful. I grew up as a child in a village in Colombia, where there was a very similar attitude to just using what was around.’
— Oscar Murillo, from interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist published in Work (Rubell Family Collection: 2012)
Since 2013, through his ongoing collaborative project Frequencies, Murillo has worked with schools across the globe, placing pieces of raw canvas on schools students’ desks and inviting them to draw and write on, mark and illustrate them. To date, thousands of students, primarily aged 10 to 16, have participated. The canvases are added to a growing archive, selections of which have been exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale, Italy the 2nd Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art 2016, China and 3rd Aichi Triennial, Japan.
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