Marks and Whispers

Gagosian gallery in Rome presents to the public paintings and works on paper by Colombian artist Oscar Murillo, winner of the 2019 Turner Prize and already featured in numerous international collections including the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Taguchi Art Collection in Tokyo.

The exhibition underscores the formal, political and social dimensions of the color red in Murillo’s art practice, which has been marked since its inception by multiple strands (Murillo produces expansive canvases, constructed from stitched-together elements, as well as drawings, books and installations), by ideas of collectivity and shared culture, a commitment to the power of material presence. In Marks and Whispers each work suggests fragility, despair, vulnerability and precariousness: their surfaces, layered with hues of red, hint at allude at anguish in a world of richness.

The exhibition includes paintings from the Catalyst series, which Murillo has been working on since 2011 and is still in the process of becoming; the impressive works from the Manifestation series (2018-), with dense gestural marks and thick pictorial impastoes layered on fragments of canvas stitched together; and those from Murillo’s most recent series, Scarred Spirits, a meditation on automatic drawing of monumental scale that contains a memory of his studio practice and represents an evolution of his creative process.

Murillo’s reflection on sign-making continues in the Flight drawings, made by the artist during his travels around the world: characterized by a certain essentiality of the pictorial medium, with repeated traces of ink, letters, words and numbers, they explore the possibilities of improvisation with a restricted range of instruments.

Cover: OSCAR MURILLO, Telegram, 2013-24
Mixed media on canvas
17 3/4 x 25 5/8 inches (45 x 65 cm)
© Oscar Murillo. Photo: Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian