MONTERREY.- Through interactive painting, video work and installation pieces, the artist Oscar Murillo conceives of the spaces within MARCO as a social arena in his survey Espíritus en el pantano (Spirits in the Swamp), demonstrating a commitment to the power of material presence and the importance of collectivity and shared culture.
Explore the powerful, multifaceted work of Oscar Murillo! This comprehensive overview, featuring paintings, installations, and video works, showcases his unique artistic voice. Click here to purchase and delve into his dynamic career.
According to Taiyana Pimentel, director of MARCO and curator of the show, the artist revisits the pictorial tradition, drawing on different languages examined from the point of view of avant-garde movements such as Impressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and body language. However, Murillo often reverses the tradition in which the artist is the sole creative agent by inviting communities from around the world to participate, turning the act of art making into a vehicle of dialogue and gathering, rooted in participation.
After obtaining his Master’s from the Royal College of Art, Oscar Murillo had his first solo exhibition, Arepas y Tamales (2011), at Cole Contemporary gallery in London. During the show, the artist spent time preparing typical Colombian dishes and fostering social interaction with visitors to the space. This kind of interaction reflects Murillo's long standing belief that art holds a significant social and political component, creating a space for community engagement, collective action, as well as moments of encounter and coexistence.
One of the main works featured inside the Mexican venue hosting Murillo’s transcendental practice is Espíritus en el pantano (Spirits in the Swamp, [2024-2025]). Vast lengths of artist-grade canvas will trace the parameter of each room, filled with messages, marks and drawings left by visitors to the Museum over the preceding months. This same canvas also traveled to Casanicolás, a local migrant shelter, where participants were invited to leave their marks on this collective artwork. Members of the Cruz Rosa association, dedicated to supporting women with cancer, visited the museum as a group to take part.
Every Wednesday and Sunday, when admission to MARCO is free to the public, Murillo will invite participants to paint atop these marked cloths, creating a swamp of layered marks. Visitors of all ages will be able to use shades of blue, green, yellow, and magenta to collectively create the spirits in the swamp.
Within this conceived swamp: large swathes of draped black canvas, made from fabric taken from the artist’s studio floor; videos of people celebrating in Murillo’s hometown of La Paila; a monumental wooden seating structure; plastic chairs; rock-like sculptures, hewn from corn, works on paper and paintings. Each work on show is conceived as a spirit in a swamp of layered marks, emblematic of a series of moments in the artist’s life. Presented together, they blur class lines, cultures and geographies, transforming the space into a meeting place of spirits: artworks, participants, and viewers alike.
In this way, the exhibition is not only centred on the marks made in the present, but also to those made in the past, an ode to ancestral spirit through culture and memory.
Espíritus en el pantano (Spirits in the Swamp), by Oscar Murillo, marks the artist's first exhibition in a museum space in Mexico. In 2021, Murillo presented his paintings at the Parroquia de San Agustín on the Yucatán Peninsula in a show titled ética y estética, organized by Kurimanzutto. In 2020, under the same exhibition title, he presented paintings in a church in his hometown of La Paila.
MARCO thanks the Government of the State of Nuevo León through the Secretaría de Cultura del Estado for its support, as well as the Berel company, and the Kurimanzutto Gallery for being key partners in this exhibition. It extends its gratitude to Arca Continental, Berel, Cemex, Cydsa, Femsa, Frisa, and Xignux, as well as to Arte Expuesto and VMedia Group, the benefactor companies supporting the institution year after year.
EXHIBITION WALKTRHOUGH
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the above-mentioned work titled Espíritus en el pantano (Spirits in the Swamp, [2024-2025]). Artist-grade canvas filled with sketches, sentences, thoughts, and feelings from the community, will be installed in the four exhibition rooms and visitors will be invited to paint using acrylic paint provided by the museum.
During the summer of 2024, Murillo staged a similar participatory project at Tate Modern in London, commissioned as part of the UNIQLO Tate Play programme. Inspired by Monet's work, canvas was installed in the Turbine Hall on a concave-shaped structure, ready to be painted by the public with varying shades of blue. The result was an explosion of expressive brushstrokes; this process will be replicated at MARCO.
Throughout the exhibition, significant works from Murillo's body of work are also presented. The first room features the video work WRAPPED (2024). Just behind it, a large-scale photograph shows the artist's Mother sleeping in her work uniform. The image carries the same title as the artist’s 2013 presentation at David Zwirner, New York, A Mercantile Novel (2013). This image was first presented in the gallery alongside a staged production line from Colombina, a candy factory based in Oscar’s hometown of La Paila. Here, in the spaces of MARCO, Murillo presents the spirits of this scene of labor; a video work of the artist, locked in repetitive movement; empty chairs, symbolizing a fleeting moment or gathering and, crumbling, rock-like sculptures, hewn from corn and clay. Together, these works highlight a tension between basic materials, labor and traded commodities.
Amongst these works, hang three paintings by Murillo titled, Telegram (2013-2024). These paintings are mined from Murillo’s Frequencies project which saw the artist install canvas on school desks around the world, spending a decade collecting conscious and unconscious marks from students. In these paintings, individual Frequencies canvases are ‘tuned into’, or intercepted by the artist. The intervention happens at the intimate level of a singular canvas, which is displayed cropped and framed, suspended from the ceiling in the space.
A series of heavily stitched and weathered black canvases hang from the ceiling in various places throughout the show titled, signalling devices from a now bastard territory (2014-ongoing). Reminiscent of flags, these works call into question complex histories of nation-building, and of the material structures that propagate and legitimize imperial powers. In these spaces, the artist uses the formal qualities of draped black canvases as a powerful, spiritual witness to a collective mourning, signalling both absence and renewal. Over time, the canvases will pick up marks from the surrounding interactive painting.
In the next room plays, Human Resources (2017), a performance from Murillo’s 2017 presentation at Carlos/Ishikawa gallery in London in which a man sings a traditional Colombian folksong in front of an installation of seated mateos - traditional papier-mâché figures made in Colombia. Each year these mateos or effigies are burned in a bonfire as a cleansing ritual in anticipation of the new year. In Murillo’s work these figures are often presented seated on tiered seating suggesting a stadium or theatre, alluding to Murillo’s interest in the pursuit of leisure and entertainment as well as labour – or indeed art – as activities in the social realm. The mass of bodies patiently waiting for a spectacle to begin invites the viewer to consider the process by which cultures and traditions can also be transformed into spectacles for consumption.
In continuation of this, the following room showcases a series of videos taken by Oscar throughout his life, snapshots of celebrations in London beside footage of street parties in La Paila; glimpses of the Statue of Liberty in New York and of Buckingham Palace in London. These videos are poignant yet celebratory, foregrounding the collective experience that has shaped Murillo’s life. The title of these video works is THEM (2012-2024).
In the final room of the show, Murillo positions one of his large, tiered seating structures. Unlike previous presentations the effigies are not present here, instead, the artist sees this as the centre-point of the surrounding social arena. A contemplative place for members of the public to sit, surrounded by the energy of mark-making.
The artist’s site-specific Mesmerizing Beauty (2025) installation is gathered towards the end of the exhibition space. The works, with their small paintings on wooden supports resemble placards. Perhaps recalling another type of gathering: a political protest. The chairs, here, stand in for unseen protagonists, seeking to convey a message which is as inscrutable as it is urgent.
Murillo’s interest in social relations is also a tacit presence within these painted studies – the flowing, aqueous gestures of his painting consciously evoke the marks of Monet. Fascinated by the fact that Monet suffered from cataracts which impaired his vision, Murillo uses these markings as a cipher for what he terms ‘social cataracts’ or study for social cataracts, a blindness permeating contemporary society.
The exhibition ends with one of the artist’s large-scale paintings titled, Fields of spirits. These paintings see the artist’s Frequencies canvases stitched together to create long composite landscapes, onto which Murillo works in bursts of red. The practice of stitching together fragments made in different spaces and time periods, moving from place to place, has been a frequent feature of Murillo’s work. Much like the exhibition as a whole, this painting brings different energies together, composed as a single painted plane. Patches of visible canvas beneath the drawings foreground the layered quality of the works, obliterating and revealing the material below.
As a whole, Murillo uses the spaces in MARCO to explore a complex mesh of cultural identities, referencing commodities, gatherings, geographies and mark-making, which in turn become loaded within the formal setting of a museum. The artist has often spoken of his goal is to make art that is “democratic,” “participatory,” and accessible to all. Here, this aim is heightened: the social arena of Espíritus en el pantano (Spirits in the Swamp).
Artdaily participates in the Amazon Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. When you purchase through our links, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. These commissions help us continue curating and sharing the art world’s latest news, stories, and resources with our readers.
