OSCAR MURILLO (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) has developed a multifaceted and challenging practice that spans painting, collaborative projects, video, sound and installation. Through each body of work, the artist probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, demonstrating a commitment to the power of material presence alongside complex meditations on contemporary society.

A focus on the social dimension that sits on the border between performance and events is also central to Murillo’s practice. He often invites collaborators to participate in generative moments of collective energy: creating vast collaborative paintings with over 70,000 participants in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, walking through New York or travelling between UK cities carrying mateos (traditional papier-mâché figures made in Colombia), hosting a cleaners’ party at the Serpentine Gallery, painting swathes of linen black in community centres, or holding a runway performance, open to the public, in a 14th century building in Venice. Each of these projects point to a perpetual curiosity into global social and economic exchange, community, and collaboration.

Murillo’s paintings spring from this same source of collectivity. Spanning the last 15 years, the bodies of work on view at Murillo’s inaugural show with kurimanzutto gallery are composite grounds, not just in the literal sense, but conceptually too. Often made from pieces of canvas that have inhabited the studio over long periods of time or canvases from the artist’s Frequencies archive, each work is then woven together by a combination of pigment, words and gesture. These ingredients are layered atop one another in a series of marks, traces and impressions often made through physically printing one painting onto another. The result is a series of binaries: line next to gesture, pigment next to canvas, blue next to red, abundance next to scarcity, intuition next to chance.