Oscar Murillo – How Restless Surfaces Become Social Archives
Oscar Murillo is a Colombian-born artist whose paintings, installations, films, performances, and collaborative projects examine how people and materials move through a globalized world. His stitched canvases accumulate paint, handwriting, dirt, packaging, and traces of earlier activity, making the process and social conditions behind an artwork impossible to separate from its finished form.
Key Takeaways
- Murillo was born in La Paila, Colombia, in 1986 and moved to London with his family when he was ten.
- His practice extends beyond abstract painting to installation, sculpture, video, performance, drawing, and long-term participatory projects.
- Stitched canvas fragments, studio debris, handwritten words, black pigment, and exposed supports are recurring features of his work.
- Frequencies, initiated in 2013, gathered canvases marked by students at hundreds of schools around the world.
- He shared the 2019 Turner Prize with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Tai Shani after the four nominees asked to be considered collectively.
- Projects such as A Mercantile Novel and The flooded garden turn exhibition spaces into active sites of production and participation.
Who Is Oscar Murillo?
Oscar Murillo was born in 1986 in La Paila, a town in Colombia’s Valle del Cauca region. The local economy and social life were closely connected to agriculture and manufacturing, including the Colombina confectionery factory where members of his family worked. When Murillo was ten, his family relocated to London, introducing him to a markedly different linguistic, cultural, and economic environment.
That history supplies concrete material for his art, but it should not be reduced to a simple immigrant narrative.
Murillo has repeatedly resisted the assumption that migration provides a complete explanation of his identity or work. His projects are more broadly concerned with circulation: the movement of workers, commodities, images, words, materials, and cultural practices across borders.
Education and Early Working Life
Murillo completed a BA in Fine Art at the University of Westminster in 2007 and an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2012. Before supporting himself through art, he worked in schools and as an office cleaner. These jobs later became conspicuous details in profiles of his rapid ascent, although focusing on them as a dramatic success story obscures the sustained experimentation that shaped his early practice.
His first major institutional solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, if i was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator, opened at the South London Gallery in 2013. Instead of presenting a conventional sequence of framed paintings, Murillo transferred much of his studio’s contents into the gallery. Stitched canvases, films, drawings, sculptures, marked copper sheets, and masses made from pulped drawings transformed the exhibition into a record of labor and accumulation.
What Defines Oscar Murillo’s Art?
Painting remains the structural foundation of Murillo’s practice, even when an exhibition includes sound, furniture, video, performance, or public participation. He approaches painting less as the production of isolated images than as an extended process of marking, handling, transporting, obscuring, cutting, and recombining materials.
How to Recognize His Work
- Visible seams: canvases are frequently assembled from separately worked pieces rather than stretched as a single, pristine surface.
- Accumulated matter: dirt, dust, graphite, thread, natural pigments, packaging fragments, and studio debris may remain embedded in the work.
- Unstable presentation: paintings can hang like flags or curtains, drape over rails, lie in piles, or interact with scaffolding and metal structures.
- Layered language: isolated words, numbers, slogans, food references, and copied texts appear beneath, beside, or within gestural passages.
- Contrasting color fields: soiled neutral surfaces and dense blacks coexist with forceful passages of red, blue, yellow, and orange.
- Evidence of duration: folds, stains, abrasion, transfers, and overpainting reveal that a surface has been worked and stored over time.
Stitching, Folding, and Reuse
The seams in Murillo’s paintings are functional and conceptual. He works on individual pieces of canvas or linen, sometimes retaining fragments from earlier paintings, and later stitches them into larger compositions. The joined sections preserve different moments, gestures, and material histories within a single object.
This construction prevents the image from appearing seamless or self-contained. A line of cotton thread may interrupt an area of oil paint, while a piece of linen responds differently from the canvas beside it. Rather than disguising those inconsistencies, Murillo makes them legible. The resulting surface resembles an archive assembled from partial records rather than a window onto one coherent scene.
Folding and storage also affect the paintings. Creases, transferred pigment, rubbed areas, and dirt are not necessarily accidental damage to be concealed. They testify to where a canvas has been placed, how it has traveled, and what other materials have touched it. Production therefore continues outside the moment when paint meets surface.
Words, Packaging, and Everyday Materials
Murillo’s earlier paintings often include words associated with food, work, leisure, or commercial packaging. References to corn, yucca, poultry, and consumer goods do not operate as a stable symbolic vocabulary with one translation. They carry evidence of advertising, family life, commodity circulation, and the movement of Spanish-language products into London. Printed and handwritten elements are repeatedly covered, fragmented, or displaced.
A word may remain recognizable while losing the sentence or package that originally gave it meaning. This partial legibility parallels the movement of language across different cultural settings: a term travels, but its context changes.
From the Studio to Social Systems
Murillo’s work repeatedly connects physical art-making with structures of production and exchange. The studio is one model of labor, but factories, classrooms, streets, churches, museums, and public gathering places can also become sites where his work is made.
A Mercantile Novel: Rebuilding a Factory in a Gallery
For A Mercantile Novel at David Zwirner in New York in 2014, Murillo collaborated with Colombina to install an operational candy-production line inside the gallery. The company was founded in La Paila, and several generations of his family had worked for it. Factory employees traveled from Colombia to New York to manufacture and distribute sweets during the exhibition.
The project displaced an existing process rather than staging an imaginary factory. Machinery, ingredients, workers, products, and routines crossed into a commercial art space, where their meanings shifted. Visitors encountered the factory as performance and installation, while the sweets circulated beyond the gallery as consumable objects.
The work raised questions about which forms of labor become visible in cultural institutions and how audiences respond when industrial production occupies a space normally reserved for finished art. It also complicated any simple opposition between Murillo’s Colombian childhood and his international career: the factory was already part of a global commercial network before it entered the New York gallery.
Frequencies: Classroom Desks as Recording Surfaces
Initiated in 2013 with political scientist Clara Dublanc and developed with Murillo’s family, studio team, schools, and local collaborators, Frequencies placed raw canvas on classroom desks used by students generally aged ten to sixteen. Over several months, the students could draw, write, scratch, doodle, erase, or simply allow daily classroom activity to mark the material.
The returned canvases contain deliberate images alongside stains, pressure marks, fragments of language, names, logos, and incidental wear. By the project’s second decade, it had reached more than 450 schools internationally and produced an archive containing tens of thousands of canvases.
The project is collaborative, but the contributions are not organized into a single collective message. Each canvas records several kinds of activity, and the archive brings culturally specific expressions into proximity with recurring motifs of adolescence. A football emblem, declaration of friendship, political slogan, or abstract scribble may appear without an explanatory caption.
Frequencies should not be mistaken for a scientific survey of young people. The participating schools do not form a uniform sample, and the marks cannot provide transparent access to a student’s inner life. Its strength lies elsewhere: it makes duration, repetition, and uncontrolled contact materially visible while questioning the assumption that an artist must produce every mark in an artwork.
The project has appeared in settings including the 2015 Venice Biennale, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Mori Art Museum, and the artist’s former London secondary school, Cardinal Pole Catholic School. At the latter venue in 2021, an extensive presentation returned the accumulated material to an educational environment rather than isolating it within a conventional museum display.
Black Canvases and The Institute of Reconciliation
Murillo’s black paintings offer a counterweight to the graphic color and language associated with much of his earlier work. He paints, folds, rubs, carries, and reuses lengths of dark canvas, which may be suspended as barriers, draped across structures, or gathered on the floor. Differences in opacity, sheen, wear, and texture prevent the black surfaces from becoming uniform monochromes.
In the ongoing installation The Institute of Reconciliation, begun in 2014, blackened fabric has appeared with elements including metal frameworks, coins, corn, clay, and figurative effigies. The word “institute” suggests an organized civic structure, yet the installation does not establish a fixed institution or a prescribed path toward reconciliation. Instead, it creates a provisional space in which mourning, labor, ritual, and social division can be considered together.
The canvases also change how viewers move. When they block windows, divide rooms, or hang loosely from rails, painting becomes an architectural material rather than an image encountered only from the front. Its weight and scale must be negotiated bodily.
Major Painting Bodies and Visual Developments
violent amnesia
The painting violent amnesia, produced between 2014 and 2018 and first publicly presented at Kettle’s Yard in 2019, adapts Murillo’s hanging banner format. Its canvas and linen support carries oil, oil stick, and graphite and hangs from a metal structure rather than remaining tightly stretched against a wall.
Unlike more nearly monochromatic black banners, this work incorporates outlines of landmasses and images of birds. Kettle’s Yard explained the birds as a counterpoint to human border restrictions: their movement is not governed by passports or immigration systems. That specific institutional interpretation is reinforced by the physical format. The loose canvas resembles a displaced flag but does not settle into a stable national emblem.
The title joins two apparently incompatible conditions. Amnesia implies loss or suppression, while violence suggests an active force. The painting does not illustrate a single forgotten event; its accumulated and partially concealed imagery presents memory as something repeatedly marked, covered, and reactivated.
Manifestation and News
Murillo began the related manifestation and news painting bodies in 2018. These large works are built from sewn pieces of canvas, linen, and, in some examples, velvet. Oil paint, oil stick, graphite, thread, and spray paint form dense fields in which underlying letters or earlier passages remain only partly visible.
The manifestation paintings often set intense blues and reds against jagged black gestures. Their scale makes the physical reach of the artist’s body apparent, while the title connects a painted mark with public demonstration.
The relationship is not a literal depiction of protest. It lies in the use of the body to occupy space, exert pressure, and leave a forceful trace. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Murillo worked in La Paila on paintings exhibited as News in Paris in 2020. Made amid isolation and political unrest, they expanded the existing manifestation series rather than forming a detached response to one news cycle. Fragments from earlier canvases were sewn into new supports and covered again, allowing older studio histories to persist inside paintings shaped by a different moment.
Surge and Disrupted Frequencies
In the surge works, broad strokes spread across large surfaces with a rhythm that suggests currents, waves, or flooded ground. Murillo has connected the related phrase social cataracts to Claude Monet’s impaired eyesight and to metaphorical forms of social blindness. The reference does not make the paintings imitations of Monet; it provides a way to connect optical experience, darkness, color, and obstructed perception.
disrupted frequencies reworks material originating in the classroom project. Smaller marked canvases are stitched into monumental compositions and partly overpainted, particularly with blue. At WIELS in 2024, six expansive works were mounted on scaffolding to form a panorama. Close viewing revealed the student marks and seams beneath the larger painterly movement.
This reuse poses an important tension. The original canvases preserve local and individual marks, while their combination produces a mass that can no longer be read primarily through individual authorship. Murillo does not resolve that tension; he uses it to test what happens when an archive becomes raw material for another painting.
Drawing, Film, Sound, and Performance
Drawing accompanies Murillo wherever he works. His flight drawings were made while traveling, often on an airplane tray table, using pen, pencil, graphite, and carbon paper. Carbon transfers distribute one gesture across several sheets, repeating the logic of contact and residual marks found in his stitched paintings. The film meet me! Mr. Superman, made between 2013 and 2015, records New Year celebrations in La Paila.
Its shifting camera moves between immersion in the crowd and observation from a distance.
At WIELS, the film’s layered street sounds and bell-like score were projected from a structure incorporating stitched and painted linen, joining moving image, sound, architecture, and painting within one environment. Performances extend written language into shared time. In Echoing Spirits, performers repeat and layer words or phrases drawn from Murillo’s works. Accumulation occurs through voices rather than pigment: individual utterances become part of a collective rhythm without fully merging into a single statement.
The 2019 Turner Prize
Murillo was shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize following exhibitions including Violent Amnesia at Kettle’s Yard and his participation in the 10th Berlin Biennale. His installation at Turner Contemporary combined painted surfaces, black fabric, church seating, and humanlike figures associated with his continuing investigation of labor and collective conscience.
Before the award was announced, Murillo, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Tai Shani wrote to the jury asking to be considered as a collective. The jury accepted the request and awarded the prize jointly to all four. Their action emphasized solidarity over competition and became part of the meaning of that year’s prize rather than a minor procedural detail.
The collective award was especially consistent with Murillo’s practice. Projects such as Frequencies already challenged singular authorship, while his installations repeatedly connected individual objects to larger networks of workers, participants, and institutions.
Participation and the Museum in Recent Projects
Masses and the Transformation of an Archive
The 2024 exhibition Masses at WIELS in Brussels brought together paintings, film, sculpture, sound, marked school canvases, plastic chairs, church pews, and objects made partly from ground corn. The exhibition treated liquid, material, and sonic mass as connected forms and emphasized cycles of construction and erasure. WIELS presented the exhibition as a turning point after a decade of Frequencies.
Canvases from the project were compressed, combined, stitched, and reworked within disrupted frequencies. That gesture did not simply preserve the archive or destroy it. It changed the conditions under which the accumulated marks could be encountered.
The flooded garden at Tate Modern
In 2024, The flooded garden transformed Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into a participatory painting environment. Inspired by Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and the curved galleries designed for them at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Murillo installed monumental canvas surfaces on curved structures. Community participants had already covered the first layer with words and drawings. Museum visitors were then invited to add wave-like strokes of color, gradually flooding the underlying inscriptions with collective painting.
A selection of Murillo’s surge works in the adjacent South Tanks connected the public activity to his longer investigation of water, darkness, gesture, and obstructed vision. The project redistributed artistic agency without pretending that every participant occupied the same role. Murillo established the framework, materials, precedents, and institutional setting; other people changed the surface within those conditions. Authorship became layered rather than simply transferred from one artist to an anonymous public.
From Spirits in the Swamp to Collective Osmosis
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presented Spirits in the Swamp in 2025, Murillo’s first museum exhibition in Mexico. Large canvases carried marks made by museum visitors and participants from community organizations, including a migrant shelter. Dark fabrics previously used on the artist’s studio floor, plastic chairs, corn-based sculptures, and a monumental structure turned the galleries into active social spaces.
In 2026, Collective Osmosis connected DAS MINSK Kunsthaus and Museum Barberini in Potsdam.
Murillo placed new paintings and works from the surge, Scarred Spirits, and Disrupted Frequencies series in dialogue with Claude Monet. A nationwide Social Mapping initiative and an outdoor collective painting invited communities across Germany to contribute marks to canvases. The metaphor of osmosis describes movement across a permeable boundary. Applied to the exhibition, it clarifies a recurring principle in Murillo’s work: museums, studios, communities, and historical paintings are distinct structures, but they can be placed in contact so that materials and meanings pass between them.
Labor, Migration, and Collective Culture
Labor Without a Single Heroic Producer
Murillo’s paintings are physically demanding, but he does not present artistic labor as an isolated heroic act. Factory workers, school students, relatives, performers, fabricators, and museum visitors appear as participants in different projects. Their contributions range from producing sweets to marking canvas or activating an installation through speech and movement.
This does not eliminate differences in status or power. A gallery visitor, an industrial worker, and an internationally represented artist occupy unequal positions. Works such as A Mercantile Novel become meaningful because they expose those distinctions within the same space rather than claiming that temporary participation has removed them.
Movement Without a Fixed Cultural Center
Murillo’s art is informed by ties between Colombia and Britain, yet it does not arrange those places as simple opposites. La Paila is simultaneously a childhood home, an industrial town, a working site, and a place connected to international commerce. London is both an adopted home and a city structured by migrant labor and global capital.
Traveling canvases and drawings extend this geography. Materials collect marks in classrooms, studios, aircraft, streets, and museums before being brought together elsewhere. Place remains visible as a residue, but no location provides a complete or final meaning.
A Common Misconception: Murillo as a Market Phenomenon
Early media attention frequently centered on the rapid rise of prices for Murillo’s paintings. That coverage made the market appear to be the central subject of his career and sometimes encouraged viewers to treat the work as a fashionable variant of gestural abstraction. The chronology complicates that account. By the time auction coverage intensified, Murillo was already developing installations, communal meals, films, studio environments, and socially structured events.
The long duration of Frequencies, the operational system of A Mercantile Novel, and the repeated transformation of black canvases demonstrate a practice concerned with more than the circulation of individual paintings as commodities. The market history remains part of his reception, but it is not an adequate interpretive framework. Looking at how a work was assembled, used, transported, displayed, and activated provides a more precise understanding than treating its visual disorder as a recognizable commercial style.
Museum Exhibitions and Collections
Murillo’s work has been shown at institutions including the South London Gallery, Haus der Kunst, Kettle’s Yard, Aspen Art Museum, Mori Art Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Serralves Museum, WIELS, Tate Modern, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey. He has also participated in international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, and Berlin Biennale.
Works by Murillo are held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate, the Broad, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Moderna Museet, and Museum Ludwig.
These holdings place his paintings and mixed-media works within institutional accounts of contemporary abstraction, global exchange, and socially engaged practice. Oscar Murillo’s art begins with marks but rarely ends with a self-contained painting. Seams expose different histories, dirt records contact, and words retain fragments of displaced contexts. When those materials enter factories, classrooms, museums, performances, or collective painting sessions, the artwork becomes a structure through which people and processes encounter one another.
His practice is therefore best understood through the relationship between material intensity and social organization. The surfaces may look spontaneous, but they are formed through duration, reuse, travel, collaboration, and deliberate changes of context. Their restlessness is not merely a visual effect; it is the means by which painting becomes a record of circulation and collective life.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Kind of Artist Is Oscar Murillo?
Oscar Murillo is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist whose practice is grounded in painting but also includes installation, drawing, sculpture, video, sound, performance, and participatory projects. His work frequently examines labor, cultural exchange, collective activity, and the movement of materials across different settings.
What Is Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies Project?
Frequencies is a long-term project initiated in 2013 in which raw canvases were attached to classroom desks used by students, generally aged ten to sixteen. The canvases accumulated drawings, writing, scratches, stains, and incidental marks before being collected into an international archive. The project reached more than 450 schools and generated tens of thousands of canvases.
Why Does Oscar Murillo Use Dirt and Old Canvas?
Dirt, creases, fragments, and transferred pigment preserve evidence of how a surface was stored, handled, transported, or used in the studio. By retaining those traces, Murillo challenges the expectation that a completed painting should conceal its production history. Reused fragments also allow several periods of work to coexist within one composition.
Did Oscar Murillo Win the Turner Prize?
Yes. Murillo shared the 2019 Turner Prize with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Tai Shani. The four nominees asked the jury to consider them collectively, and the jury unanimously agreed to award the prize to the group.
Where Can Oscar Murillo’s Work Be Seen?
His work is represented in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the Broad, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, and Museum Ludwig. Because many of his installations and participatory projects are temporary, current museum and gallery programs should be checked before planning a visit.
Cite this Article
artincontext, , “Oscar Murillo – How Restless Surfaces Become Social Archives.” Art in Context. September 6, 2026. URL: https://artincontext.org/oscar-murillo/
, a. (2026, 6 September). Oscar Murillo – How Restless Surfaces Become Social Archives. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/oscar-murillo/
, artincontext. “Oscar Murillo – How Restless Surfaces Become Social Archives.” Art in Context, September 6, 2026. https://artincontext.org/oscar-murillo/.
