There is a moment in Oscar Murillo’s practice that returns again and again, in different forms and across different media: the moment when the body meets the earth, when labour leaves its mark on a surface, when something as elemental as corn, clay, or sugar becomes the carrier of an entire history. Murillo is a painter — one of the most important painters working today — but his practice extends far beyond the canvas. It encompasses installation, performance, sculpture, video, and long-term collaborative projects that involve thousands of people across dozens of countries. What unites all of it is a sustained, deeply personal engagement with the forces that shape human life: migration, labour, nourishment, memory, and the complex, often painful legacies of colonialism and globalisation.
Born in 1986 in La Paila, a small town in the Valle del Cauca department of Colombia — one of the country’s largest producers of sugarcane — Murillo spent the first decade of his life in a community defined by agricultural labour and the rhythms of the land . His parents moved to London when he was ten, and Murillo grew up navigating two worlds: the intimate, physical world of his Colombian childhood and the urban, multicultural world of East London. He studied Fine Art at the University of Westminster (BA, 2007) and then at the Royal College of Art (MA, 2012), working as a school teacher and gallery installer in the years between . By 2013 — the year he turned twenty-seven — his paintings were commanding six figures at auction and he was included in a major group show at MoMA in New York. The speed of his rise was extraordinary; the depth of his practice has only grown in the years since.
The Studio as World: Materials, Process, and Place
Murillo’s materials are not neutral. When he incorporates corn and clay into his sculptures and installations — as he did in his landmark exhibition through patches of corn, wheat and mud at David Zwirner New York in 2016 — he is not making a decorative choice or a formal one. He is reaching back into the specific material history of La Paila, a town whose identity is inseparable from the cultivation of the land, and bringing that history into the space of the contemporary art world . The corn is Colombian corn. The clay is Colombian clay. The labour embedded in these materials — the labour of four generations of his family, the labour of the workers at the Colombina chocolate factory that has employed his community for decades — is the invisible content of every work.
This insistence on the material specificity of place is one of the things that distinguishes Murillo from other painters working in an expressionistic vein. His canvases are not simply gestural; they are archival. They carry within them the traces of specific places, specific bodies, specific histories. The large-scale patchwork canvases that have become one of his signatures — assembled from fragments of linen and canvas stitched together, painted and repainted, folded and unfolded, dragged across studio floors — are records of a process that is as much physical as conceptual. Murillo has described his studio practice as fundamentally tied to the environment in which he works:
“I grew up in the context of my village — but it could obviously have been anywhere. If anything, I want to eradicate those ideas of difference which bring about hierarchies.”
The reference to resourcefulness is important. Murillo’s practice is not one of abundance or waste; it is one of accumulation and transformation, of finding meaning in the materials that are already present, already used, already marked by human activity. The canvas that has been dragged across the floor carries the floor within it. The painting that incorporates dirt and debris carries the specific geography of its making. This is not romanticism; it is a rigorous formal strategy that insists on the inseparability of art and life.
The Body of Work: Key Series and Projects
The Manifestation Series. The Manifestation paintings — large-scale works combining oil, oil stick, spray paint, dirt, and graphite on canvas and linen — represent Murillo at his most painterly and his most politically charged. These are not quiet works. They are dense, layered, physically overwhelming — paintings that demand the body of the viewer as much as the eye. The series began in earnest around 2019, in the period following the death of Murillo’s mentor, the curator and critic Okwui Enwezor, and has continued to evolve through subsequent years of global crisis and upheaval. In his 2024 London exhibition A balancing act between collapse and spirit at David Zwirner, Murillo described the Manifestation works as “protests” — a term that reflects both the urgency of the political moment and the long tradition of painting as a form of public address . The works in this exhibition, made between 2023 and 2024, were among the most ambitious of his career: canvases measuring up to 110 by 165 inches, their surfaces alive with the accumulated marks of an extended, physically demanding process.
The Telegram Series. Running alongside the Manifestation works, the Telegram series — begun in 2013 and still ongoing — takes a different approach to the question of communication and connection. These are smaller, more intimate works, made with an extraordinary range of mark-making tools: oil, oil stick, ballpoint pen, fountain pen, graphite, felt-tip pen, highlighter, permanent marker, crayon, staples, natural pigments, and debris. The Telegram works read like messages — urgent, fragmented, layered with meaning — and their title invokes the history of long-distance communication, the desire to reach across distances of geography and time. In the context of Murillo’s practice, they function as a kind of counterpoint to the monumental Manifestation paintings: where those works address the collective and the political, the Telegram series speaks to the individual and the intimate .
The Institute for Reconciliation Series. Among Murillo’s most formally distinctive bodies of work, the Institute for Reconciliation series consists of large canvases coated in dense layers of ivory black oil paint. The surfaces are intensely material — the paint is applied with such thickness and physicality that it seems almost sculptural, recalling Richard Serra’s use of oil stick and Jannis Kounellis’s Arte Povera approach to paint as a factual substance rather than an illusionistic medium . These black canvases have been displayed in a variety of configurations: hung on walls, draped as flags, laid on floors. At Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge in 2019, they were distributed across the gallery, the historic house, and St Peter’s Church — a spatial argument about the relationship between mourning, memory, and the built environment.
The Surge Works. The Surge series — large-scale paintings combining oil, oil stick, graphite, and spray paint — represents Murillo’s most direct engagement with the tradition of gestural abstraction. The Brooklyn Rail critic Phyllis Tuchman, reviewing the 2022 New York exhibition Ourself behind ourself concealed at David Zwirner, described the works as paintings that “would not look out-of-place in a survey exhibition featuring significant works by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Leslie, Harry Jackson, and Grace Hartigan” — a comparison that places Murillo squarely within the lineage of second-generation Abstract Expressionism while acknowledging the distinctiveness of his contribution . The Surge works are characterised by their scale (some reaching eleven and a half feet by fifteen feet), their layered complexity, and what Murillo describes as “pools of colour” — passages of red, blue, green, and yellow that interact with black and white to create surfaces of extraordinary depth and energy.
Frequencies: Art as Collective Practice
No account of Oscar Murillo’s work is complete without a sustained engagement with Frequencies, the long-term participatory project that he has been developing since 2013. The project is deceptively simple in its mechanism: raw canvases are temporarily affixed to classroom desks in schools across the world, and students aged ten to sixteen are invited to make any kind of mark — drawing, writing, doodling, scribbling — on the canvas surface during their normal school day. The canvases are then collected, archived, and exhibited .
The scale of Frequencies is staggering. To date, more than 50,000 canvases have been produced by over 100,000 students in 36 countries, from Colombia to South Africa, from Japan to the United Kingdom . The project has been exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2017), the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2021), and dozens of other institutions worldwide. A comprehensive monograph, published by Hatje Cantz in 2024 with texts by Mark Godfrey, Eleanor Nairne, Gabi Ngcobo, and Alessandro Rabottini, provides an archive of the project’s many iterations over its first decade.
Frequencies is not a pedagogical exercise or a community outreach programme, though it is both of those things. It is, more fundamentally, an argument about the nature of art-making and the distribution of creative agency. By placing the canvas — the traditional support of Western painting — in the hands of children who have no particular relationship to the art world, Murillo democratises the act of mark-making while simultaneously questioning the hierarchies that determine whose marks are considered art and whose are not. The Disrupted Frequencies canvases — works that Murillo has made by painting over and transforming the students’ original marks — extend this argument further, creating objects that are genuinely collaborative in their authorship and genuinely complex in their relationship to questions of originality and ownership.
The Turbine Hall and the World Stage
In the summer of 2024, Murillo presented The flooded garden in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London — one of the most prestigious commissions in contemporary art, and one of the most physically demanding spaces in the world . The installation transformed the vast industrial space into a participatory environment in which visitors were invited to make marks on a large painted floor — a direct extension of the Frequencies logic into a monumental public context. The work was accompanied by a series of live events and performances, and attracted tens of thousands of visitors over its two-month run.
The Turbine Hall commission was, in many ways, the culmination of a decade of increasingly ambitious institutional presentations. Murillo had already shown at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice (2022), the Shed in New York (2019), the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2017), and dozens of other major venues. In 2019, he was one of four artists to share the Turner Prize — a decision made at the artists’ own request, as a gesture of solidarity that reflected Murillo’s deep commitment to collective rather than individual achievement . In 2023, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Westminster, his undergraduate alma mater.
In 2026, Collective Osmosis — an exhibition of Murillo’s work alongside paintings by Claude Monet — is on view at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus and Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, through August . The pairing of Murillo and Monet is unexpected and illuminating: both artists are painters of immersive environments, both are preoccupied with the relationship between the individual body and the natural world, and both have made works that ask the viewer to surrender to an experience rather than simply observe an object. The dialogue between them, across more than a century of art history, is one of the most thought-provoking curatorial propositions of the year.
Why Murillo Matters
Oscar Murillo’s practice matters for many reasons, but perhaps the most important is the seriousness with which it engages the question of what art is for. In a moment when the art world can seem increasingly disconnected from the social and political realities that shape most people’s lives, Murillo insists on connection — between the studio and the street, between the gallery and the school, between the individual work and the collective history that produced it.
His materials — corn, clay, sugar, dirt, the accumulated debris of a working studio — are not exotic; they are the materials of everyday life, elevated by the intensity of his attention and the rigour of his formal intelligence. His subjects — migration, labour, nourishment, memory, the legacies of colonialism — are not peripheral to the history of art; they are central to it, even if the mainstream art world has sometimes been slow to recognise this.
The Manifestation paintings, the Telegram works, the Frequencies project, the Institute for Reconciliation series — taken together, they constitute one of the most coherent and ambitious bodies of work produced by any artist of his generation. Murillo is, as the Brooklyn Rail suggested, an honorary second-generation Abstract Expressionist — but he is also something more: an artist who has taken the formal inheritance of twentieth-century painting and turned it towards the urgent questions of the twenty-first century, with a directness, a generosity, and a physical intensity that is entirely his own.
Explore Further
Oscar Murillo — View Artist Profile on Art United
FAQ
Where is Oscar Murillo from and how has his background shaped his practice?
Oscar Murillo was born in 1986 in La Paila, a small town in Colombia’s Valle del Cauca department, one of the country’s largest sugarcane-producing regions. He moved to London at the age of ten when his parents emigrated. His background — rooted in agricultural labour, the rhythms of a small Colombian town, and the experience of migration — is central to his practice, which consistently engages with themes of nourishment, labour, displacement, and the material legacies of colonialism.
What is Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies project?
Frequencies is a long-term participatory project begun in 2013 in which raw canvases are affixed to classroom desks in schools around the world, inviting students aged ten to sixteen to make any kind of mark on the surface. To date, more than 50,000 canvases have been produced by over 100,000 students in 36 countries. The project has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Haus der Kunst, Mori Art Museum, and many other institutions, and is documented in a comprehensive monograph published by Hatje Cantz in 2024.
Did Oscar Murillo win the Turner Prize?
Yes. In 2019, Murillo was one of four artists to share the Turner Prize, alongside Tai Shani, Helen Cammock, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. The four artists collectively requested that the prize be awarded to all of them jointly — a gesture of solidarity that was unprecedented in the award’s history and that reflected Murillo’s deep commitment to collective rather than individual achievement.
What are Oscar Murillo’s most important recent exhibitions?
Recent highlights include A balancing act between collapse and spirit at David Zwirner London (2024); The flooded garden in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London (2024); solo exhibitions at Fundação de Serralves, Porto, WIELS Brussels, Kunsthalle Wien, and KM21 The Hague (all 2024); and Collective Osmosis, a dialogue with Claude Monet at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus and Museum Barberini, Potsdam (2026, ongoing through August).
Which galleries represent Oscar Murillo?
Murillo is represented by David Zwirner (New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong), Carlos/Ishikawa (London), Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie (Berlin), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo), and Kurimanzutto (New York, Mexico City).
