The Colombian artist Oscar Murillo breaks this week at the Monterrey Marco Museum with an ambitious invitation: that the public intervenes his work. Murillo (La Paila, Colombia, 39 years old) wants to break with the “formality of art.” His strategy seeks to reverse the artist’s work as the only creative agent to turn the artistic process into something collective through large -format canvases covered with messages and drawings made by museum visitors. That is the new proposal of a creator who has revolutionized the world of contemporary art. “I felt dissatisfied with the institutional proposals, because they stayed very on the surface and I had this desire to have an experience with places outside me, my culture. That also fed for my condition of having been banished from my culture as a child, ”says Murillo.
The artist’s family left his Colombian people when the boy was 11 years old. They migrated to London, to a radically different culture, that children’s world of arepa, fried bananas, coffee and sugar cane, which represented a radical change for the child, which ended up influencing his art. “The migration was everything. Emigration continues to feed my work. It has been an experience that strengthened my spirit, a personal trauma, which is the cultural rupture at age 10, when you lose your friends, when you lose your land, your customs, food, the environment. The drawing became a therapy platform, ”he says in a telephone interview from Monterrey.
From Marco they explain that Murillo’s exhibition, entitled Spirits in the swamptakes over the museum with techniques that include interactive painting, video is facilities to turn the enclosure into a social sand where the idea of shared community and culture prevails. “It is an exhibition that runs through a good part of the conceptual and artistic budgets that define the work of Oscar Murillo. The artist has turned space into a shareholder, a collaborative practice. The museum’s white walls will have installed fabrics that already had a first participatory process, that is, the fabrics were traveling through different places in Monterrey, such as shelters that are receiving migrants or some public schools, so that the public could intervene them, to capture their stories, their stories, explains Taiyana Pimentel, director of Marco.
Museum visitors will follow the process during the time that the exhibition lasts, on Wednesdays and Sunday, when the entrance is free, at the request of the artist. “This exhibition is transcendental for Marco. Oscar has turned a pictorial problem into a container of community and social problems. Giving the word to the other is for me one of Murillo’s great positions in contemporary art. And convergence of experiences, narratives and stories in the same pictorial layer, in addition to moving, is something that had not been seen in art history, ”adds Pimentel.
Murillo delves into that idea of art as a participatory space, especially when he plays a subject as personal as migration. “It is very visceral and I think that suddenly there is born the title of the work Spirits in the swampbecause we are all involved as human beings. For me it is very important that this is not seen as self -gregation, where one says: “Here you are, here is a line and here I am.” For me there is a universal implication of who we are as human beings. It is, he says, an attempt to democratize art. “There was already the first participatory process, an exercise where the entire community, regardless of their social strata or political differences, were on the same platform to make a contribution, to give energy to this idea. My task is to think about how this exercise is interrupting the formality of a museum of contemporary art, the classical formality of art, which respect and has been part of my formation, ”explains the artist.
How do you feel when people intervene their work? “I like the intensity and energy with which people have taken the time and the dedication of contributing, because what is called the current disease of social networks, that disease that takes over our autonomy. This space becomes a platform to manifest a hypercolectivity, a space that unites, which is different, ”says Murillo, who sees artistic production as a form of complaint against injustices. “Through the different civilizations art has served as a witness in parallel of social realities, a witness of humanity, goes hand in hand, like a shadow,” he clarifies.
That Colombian child emigrated to London who found in the drawing a therapy has become the young prodigy of contemporary art. He went from cleaning buildings to eight euros to be the artist who from a young age revolutionized the market to the point that his works have been sold in hundreds of thousands of euros and has exposed his work in spaces such as the Tate Modern of the United Kingdom; Wiels, in Belgium; The Aspen Art Museum, in the United States; Haus der Kunst in Germany and the Art Museum of the National University of Colombia. Murillo obtained his mastery in Fine Arts at the Royal College of Art in 2012, and in 2019 he was one of the four artists collectively awarded with the prestigious Turner award. In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate from his Alma Mater, the University of Westminster. The artist has been involved in a production that tries to challenge the schemes of contemporary art, but from political commitment.
Murillo’s exhibition will be open in frame from Friday, March 14 to August 10 under the curatorship of Taiyana Pimentel and with the invitation open to the public to break the formality of art. “That proposal of making an invitation to intervene these canvases I see it as an analog recording tape. You insert the cassette in the recorder, press the record button and the company itself with its agreements and disagreements and contradictions does the task of demonstrating. And that manifestation is there for us to observe it, it becomes a reflection of what is happening. It is a space for these contradictory manifestations to make catharsis, ”explains the young painter, the migrant who has revolutionized the contemporary artistic world.