PARIS: Oscar Murillo

Oscar Murillo. Image via blogs.elpais.com. May be subject to copyright.

We Don’t Work Sundays

May 23 – July 18, 2014

GALERIE MARIAN GOODMAN

79 Rue du Temple

Paris, France

From mariangoodman.com:

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is pleased to present Oscar Murillo’s first solo exhibition in France. We Don’t Work Sundays is the third of the Colombian-born British artist’s trilogy of recent exhibitions, at the South London Gallery and The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, dwelling on the aesthetics of shared labor. This exhibition incorporates the full spectrum of his practice, including new paintings, drawings on paper, sculptures and a video projection.

Shaped by Murillo’s interest in the meanings behind object-making outside of artistic production, much of this exhibition is derived from what some working-class Colombians create in anticipation of their leisure activities. And, as with his previous projects, Murillo has engineered collaborations between incongruous groups, leading to works that counter the social hierarchies and cultural displacement he’s experienced.

My life itself has been about labor and physicality, and manipulating materials in a physical way. Those experiences definitely inform my relationship to [art]…Regardless of the idea of segregated societies, via economic status or social class; we are segregated individuals by default. I think a lot about this and how art fits into it…Any opportunity of artistic achievement comes with an opportunity to infiltrate a social class that is closely linked to art–art making, art appreciating, etc. I personally entered foreign territories with these opportunities. Since then I’ve wanted other individuals to be part of this experience…

Oscar Murillo interviewed by Cesar Garcia, in L’Officiel Art, March 2014.

The premise for We Don’t Work Sundays lay in Murillo’s conversation with a group of Afro-Colombian amateur musicians who’d created their own basic instruments: his principal interest being that they were objects made for an entirely recreational and social, not financially motivated purpose. This encounter led to him musing on what people of all cultures make and do in preparation for life outside of employment: the labor they invest in not-working.

Each year, the western Colombian city of Cali – known colloquially as the ‘Capital de la Salsa’ – hosts the Feria de Cali, a festival of carnival parades, athletic and equine events, and a salsa marathon, engendering ethnic and cultural diversity in the region. Residents spend months creating costumes and rehearsing dances in preparation for the week’s events. For this exhibition, Murillo collaborated with fashion students from l’Ecole Duperré (Ecole supérieure des arts appliqués Paris), first showing them his video of the amateur musicians, then inviting them to revisit Feria de Cali costumes through their own haute couture experience, and hanging their reinvented garments in his show.

Prior to the exhibition’s opening, he will film ballerinas wearing the fashion students’ costumes and practicing salsa moves. He’ll record them trying to set their classical training aside to embrace a dance form that is in many ways antithetical to all they’ve been taught, and the ensuing video will inhabit the basement gallery.

Murillo continues this inter-cultural stratifying elsewhere. He shot images of generic, faux-antique ‘Far Eastern’ objects from an event he’d instigated in Berlin and sent these, along with photographs of his food-packaging works from the South London Gallery show, to Dafen Village, China. He commissioned master draftsmen there to make verbatim copies of them as drawings. These will be hung among his paintings and sculptures on the ground floor, augmenting Murillo’s distillation of ostensibly disparate cultures, art forms and traditions throughout this exhibition.

Oscar Murillo was born in La Paila, Colombia in 1986 before moving to London with his family aged 10. He graduated from Westminster University, obtained an MFA from the Royal College of Art, and currently lives and works in London.

In 2012 he organized the event The Cleaner’s Late Summer Party with Comme des Garçons at the Serpentine Gallery to which he invited people from the art world and members of London’s Colombian community. The same year Murillo was invited by the Rubell Family Collection in Miami to create a series of paintings entitled Work. Murillo has taken part in various international group exhibitions, the most recent of which was the first International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, 2014.

Exhibit Link

Marian Goodman Will Show Oscar Murillo in Paris

NEW YORK: Oscar Murillo

Oscar Murillo’s mother, Virgelina Murillo (center), working at Colombina in La Paila, Colombia, 1988. Collection of the artist. Image via davidzwirner.com.

A Mercantile Novel

April 24 – June 14, 2014

Opening reception: Thursday, April 24, 2014, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

DAVID ZWIRNER

519 West 19^th Street

New York, NY

From David Zwirner press release:

David Zwirner is pleased to present its first exhibition with Oscar Murillo, who joined the gallery in September 2013. The artist will implement a candy-making factory at 519 West 19th Street in New York in collaboration with Colombina, one of the premier food companies in Colombia.

Now a global industry leader and one of the main exporters of candy to the United States, Colombina was founded in Murillo’s hometown of La Paila in the early twentieth century. It gradually became the connecting link in the surrounding area, fostering a community that expanded symbiotically as the factory grew in stature. Several generations of Murillo’s family, including his parents, have worked there in various capacities, and the artist, who was born in 1986 and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1990s, retains close ties to the site.

Murillo frequently invokes his cultural heritage in his practice and broader issues of migration, sub-localities, and displacement inform many of his works. By turning the gallery into a fully operational production site, he opens up for considerations

not merely about trade and globalization, but also about individual relationships and communities, roots and immigration. As such, the Colombina factory becomes a catalyst for a consideration of socio-economic conditions in the United States,

Colombia, and beyond, while also inviting visitors to reflect on the nature of societies, both personal and universal.

Staffed by experienced candy-making employees going about their daily work as usual, the production line at the gallery will manufacture one of Colombina’s signature candies, the Chocmelos®, following the same recipe, ingredients, techniques, and quality control procedures as the facility in La Paila. Workplace signage and overall layout are further inspired by the factory, and Murillo has designed special packaging for the exhibition featuring the Colombina logo next to the iconic yellow smiley face seen on plastic shopping bags throughout New York City. Over the course of the exhibition, tens of thousands of candies will be produced and given away for free at the gallery. A special website, mercantilenovel.com, and complementary platforms on social media (Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) have been set up by the artist and gallery to track the project, shaping new communities in the process.

Oscar Murillo earned his B.F.A. in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London, followed by his M.F.A. in 2012 from the Royal College of Art, London.

Murillo has shown in both solo and group exhibitions at prominent venues worldwide, including new works on view in 2014 in Los Angeles that marked The Mistake Room’s inaugural presentation. In 2013, the South London Gallery organized the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. In 2012, he created new paintings on site during a five-week summer residency at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, which were shown later that year marking his first solo exhibition in the United States. Other recent venues that have exhibited his works and projects include the MAMA Showroom, Rotterdam (2013) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2012).

In 2014, work by the artist is included in international group exhibitions, including the 1^st International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena, Colombia; RE: Painted | ‘Painting’ from the collection, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; Futbol: The Beautiful Game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art after Identity Politics, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp.

For his ongoing project Frequencies, created in collaboration with members of his family and political scientist Clara Dublanc, Murillo will visit schools across the globe where canvases temporarily affixed to classroom desks will register young students’ creative and critical thought processes. The project aims to offer cross-cultural and social insights into youth communities around the world.

Exhibit Link

COVER: Oscar Murillo / L'Officiel Art / Issue 9 / March - April - May 2014

From L’Officiel Art:

This ninth artist cover allows L’Officiel Art to go even more collector. For the first time, the logo has also been left to an artist’s reinterpretation. Oscar Murillo used this carte blanche to deliver a very personal work, which he conceived while he was working on his exhibition at the Mistake Room in Los Angeles.

For the logo, Oscar Murillo chose to use David Hammons’ work African American Flag which he had photographed in Harlem. He used it as a pattern to customize the three letters of the word “ART.”

“Carlos my uncle had become a travel companion and collaborator, a witness to some of the wonders that one encounters on the marathon that is being an artist. On a pre-Christmas trip to LA in preparation for the Mistake Room, Carlos and I were invited to stay in a beautiful 1930s villa, the Pink Panther! It was a week of indulgence in Beverly Hills. Concurrently it was a physical, psychological and cultural clash, the perfect opportunity to establish an image for what it has meant to no longer work Sundays. This picture of Carlos is the quintessence of my project: ‘I don’t work Sundays’ is the subtext and the manifested antithesis of a series of earlier exhibitions, installations, performances and video works.”

200 copies of the magazine with this collector cover version have been printed.

POST: Art World Places Its Bet

The artist Oscar Murillo, who was born in Colombia, at his one-room studio in East London.
Photo by Andrew Testa for the New York Times. Image via nytimes.com.

Oscar Murillo Keeps His Eyes on the Canvas

Text | Carol Vogel for the New York Times

Published | March 14, 2014

Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just turned 28.

While Mr. Murillo is little known outside clubby contemporary art circles, and he has his share of skeptics, his fans have called him “the 21st-century Basquiat.” That night, after fierce competition, “Untitled (burrito)” sold for $322,870, more than six times its high $49,000 estimate. Only two years ago, Mr. Murillo, who was born in Colombia, was waking up at 5 a.m. to clean office buildings to cover his expenses at the Royal College of Art in London. Now, he is represented by David Zwirner, one of the world’s most prestigious galleries, and when a choice canvas comes up at auction or through private sale, it can fetch more than $400,000.

The story of how a young artist like Mr. Murillo soared from struggling student to art star — courted by blue-chip dealers, inundated by curators requesting a work for a museum exhibition or biennial — reflects the way investing in contemporary art has become a gamble, like stocks and real estate. Collecting works by rising artists like Lucien Smith, Jacob Kassay, Sterling Ruby or Mr. Murillo is a competitive sport among a growing number of collectors betting on future stars.

On a recent stop in New York, Mr. Murillo sat in an office in one of David Zwirner’s Chelsea galleries, talking over plans for his first show there, an ambitious combination of performance and installation opening on April 24. Wearing scruffy jeans, a T-shirt and a black baseball cap, this usually laid-back artist bristled when asked what it was like to be so in demand, knowing how fickle the art world is. “I don’t like to think about it,” he replied, staring soberly at a cup of tea.

For Mr. Murillo, celebrity cuts both ways. He reluctantly conceded that the attention is flattering and something that hundreds of young artists could only dream of. But he knows that being thrust in the spotlight at such a young age is risky.

“This is a market hungry for the players of the future,” Allan Schwartzman, a Manhattan art adviser, said. “But almost any artist who gets that much attention so early on in his career is destined for failure. The glare is simply too bright for them to evolve.”

Like his parents, who work as cleaners and moved to London from La Paila, a tiny town in Colombia, when Mr. Murillo was 10, he is a tireless worker, and his quiet charm and relentless ambition helped fuel his popularity. Even when he was a student, collectors and friends were so convinced of his future success that they would occasionally pay $2,000 for a painting. Living in East London, which has a vibrant arts scene, he often worked as an installer for the neighborhood’s small galleries and met players like Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal years before that dealer joined David Zwirner.

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