Synopsis "Oscar Murillo: Frequencies (in English)"
Known for his large-scale paintings, Oscar Murillo’s expanding practice, which includes performance, sculpture, installation, and video, has helped define him as one of the most dynamic artists of his generation. Local in his interest in community and family, but global in his approach to art making, Murillo’s creative explorations present us with some of the most pressing questions facing us today: how do communities define themselves, and how can a single individual―an artist―help facilitate communication between them and the larger world? Frequencies is a long-term project conceived by Murillo in collaboration with writer Clara Dublanc and the artist’s parents, Belisario Caicedo and Maria Virgelina Murillo, that begins to offer answers to these questions through painting and drawing. In 2013, Murillo began sending raw canvas to selected schools in over twenty countries around the world, with the sole requirement that they be affixed to desks and illustrated by students. The canvases would stay there for a period of time and then be re-collected by the artist. Within weeks of their arrival, children from places as disparate as China and Slovenia began to draw, paint, write, and communicate, creating records of their social and educational experiences. Frequencies catalogues the first year of Murillo’s exploration, with short texts written by the artist, Dublanc, and Caicedo alongside intimate photographs of the participants documenting the project’s myriad steps. The book not only brings together a vast amount of material now collected in the eponymous archive, with over six hundred pages of detailed spreads, but is itself an extension of the project― an ongoing catalogue that charts the creation of artworks as a communal and global endeavor. Born in 1986 in La Paila, Colombia, Oscar Murillo earned his BFA in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London, followed by his MFA in 2012 from the Royal College of Art, London. In 2015, the artist debuted his Frequencies project with a large-scale installation of canvases as part of the 56th Venice Biennale. He has had solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (2015); South London Gallery (2013); Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and the Serpentine Gallery, London (both 2012).
