{"id":2451415,"date":"2019-11-21T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=316430"},"modified":"2019-11-21T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T23:00:00","slug":"turner-prize-finalist-oscar-murillo-on-new-paintings-aspen-shot-video-and-aspen-art-museum-solo-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/turner-prize-finalist-oscar-murillo-on-new-paintings-aspen-shot-video-and-aspen-art-museum-solo-exhibition\/","title":{"rendered":"Turner Prize finalist Oscar Murillo on new paintings, Aspen-shot video and Aspen Art Museum solo exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Oscar Murillo, 2018.<\/strong>
Greg Lin Jiajie\/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Walking into a new Oscar Murillo solo exhibition, like the one opening at the Aspen Art Museum on Friday, is freighted with hype.<\/p>\n

When Murillo was shortlisted for this year\u2019s Turner Prize, the citation noted how the Colombia-born artist \u201cpushes the boundaries of materials.\u201d An art star of the past decade, the 33-year-old\u2019s style is often compared to Jean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s. His work is competitively bidded up at auction and he is represented by the contemporary art kingmaker David Zwirner.<\/p>\n

But all that noise fades away once you\u2019re confronted with his work in the museum\u2019s largest gallery. Titled \u201cSocial Altitude,\u201d the multidisciplinary show includes, but transcends, the forms of painting, drawing, sculpture and video.<\/p>\n

A series of five \u201cFrequencies\u201d paintings on one wall represent a yearslong cultural exchange between young people around the world.<\/p>\n

The pieces trace back to a collaboration Murillo has undertaken with students on six continents over the past seven years. From his native Colombia to Argentina, Kenya, Japan and New York, Murillo has placed canvases on school desks of preteens and high school kids and invited the students to draw and write freely on them. He\u2019s amassed an archive of some 40,000 canvases.<\/p>\n

For the \u201cFrequencies\u201d series, he\u2019s stitched some of them together to form larger canvases, then intervened with his own work on top of them \u2014 erratic, larger-than-life scribbles in blues, reds, blacks and, for the first time in new works included here, greens. He makes those marks with a self-made oversized stylus \u2014 a broom handle, sometimes sharpened and sometimes dulled like a school kid\u2019s pencil. His marks serve as erasures and redactions that block out the students\u2019 multi-lingual doodles and graffiti-like messages, but also highlight their work that\u2019s left visible.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe project started when I was thinking about drawing, thinking about collaboration and social practice in relation to the tension between freedom and dogma,\u201d Murillo said this week in the gallery, as he and the museum team finalized installation. \u201cChildren, I believe, still have that tug-of-war between challenging the system and going through a system that, at the end, will indoctrinate them into our society. But they\u2019re not quite part of the system yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with so much of Murillo\u2019s acclaimed work, the pieces are concerned with globalization, political power and geography and are built on complex ideas like his concept of \u201csocial cataracts,\u201d Murillo\u2019s term for the ways contemporary society slowly clouds people\u2019s perception of reality. But he also wants the paintings to speak as art objects. They are beautiful and he wants them to be.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just a concept and an idea,\u201d he said, \u201cbut also a potentially successful aesthetic painting. I leave that up to the judgment of the public.\u201d<\/p>\n

His process of working with his canvases on the floor and using the oversized stylus has birthed Murillo\u2019s visual signature of action-charged strokes. He talks about it as an unconscious process of \u201cmark-making as the download of physical energy onto a plain.\u201d The physicality of the process is evident.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, they represent the body if you get close to them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He discusses his emotionally urgent work, at times, in terms of therapy and diary entries.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not about making a painting, it\u2019s about releasing energy,\u201d he explained. \u201cSo not every attempt is successful as a painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only when the process is done does he assess whether the work is at all successful as art.<\/p>\n

\u201cOften it\u2019s not,\u201d he explained, judging his success rate is about 20%.<\/p>\n

When they don\u2019t work, he recycles the canvases and uses the initial work as the base layer for another attempt or another series, like his \u201cManifestations,\u201d also included in the Aspen show.<\/p>\n

In the largest scale of these in \u201cSocial Altitude\u201d \u2014 overwhelming, rising a story high and running as long as a station wagon \u2014 you can spot an obscured letter or two from his big stylus, covered up by dramatic and chunky thick lines of carbon black.<\/p>\n

The Aspen exhibition in the museum\u2019s largest gallery includes works from four distinct but interconnected series, bisected by a painted wall that runs nearly to the gallery\u2019s high ceiling that\u2019s adorned with flag-like fabric pieces. He\u2019s installed these works in various forms around the world, including stops at the Venice Biennale, in a South Korean forest and in Azerbaijan. Spend some time with these draped works and you\u2019ll find that the sculpture-like forms of the flags are reflected in the paintings on the gallery walls and directly brought to life in a new video work.<\/p>\n

Murillo made the video, titled \u201cIndustrial Park,\u201d this summer in the Aspen backcountry. In it, the artist swims in a pond and crawls under one of the flag works on the shore, then stands and shuffles \u2014 shrouded in the drapery \u2014 into the woods like a sort of formless creature emerging from the water. Over the sounds of the water and Murillo\u2019s rustlings, a narrator reads from the Brazilian novelist Patricia Galvao\u2019s \u201cIndustrial Park.\u201d<\/p>\n

The secret voice of the show, however, may be in a series of small, intimate drawings hanging in a gallery alcove. Those pieces include more evidence of Murillo\u2019s automatic drawing, including erratic scribbles and scrawled, repeated letters and words. In some installations, Murillo has complemented these drawings with performances where he reads from the drawings, giving urgent life to them as he repeats words from the drawings like \u201c1968,\u201d \u201cStrike,\u201d \u201cA,\u201d \u201cProletariat,\u201d \u201cRockefeller,\u201d \u201cForce,\u201d \u201cTerritory,\u201d \u201cPower.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exercise is to take the drawings away from intimacy and to give it a kind of intensity within the context of the show,\u201d he explained of the performances after sharing a video of one on his phone. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ll do that here, because the paintings are already these loud voices.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibition, in other words, is intense enough as is.<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oscar Murillo, 2018.Greg Lin Jiajie\/Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Walking into a new Oscar Murillo solo exhibition, like the one opening at the Aspen Art Museum on Friday, is freighted with hype. When Murillo was shortlisted for this year\u2019s Turner Prize, the citation noted how the Colombia-born artist \u201cpushes the boundaries of materials.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2451415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-19 05:21:50","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2451415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2451415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2451415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2451415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}