Seven huge new paintings by Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo are on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum starting Friday. Currents 121: Oscar Murillo includes an artist talk at noon on Friday, March 18, and the exhibition runs through August 28. The paintings, including one triptych, are visceral, physical, and political.
Murillo created the works during the pandemic in his hometown of La Paila, Colombia. He was laboring out of a studio that he was also operating as a food bank, says Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art and curator of the show with Molly Moog, research assistant for modern and contemporary art.
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The paintings are part of an ongoing series called manifestation (2018- ). The large-scale paintings wear the physical effort and labor of creating them proudly, with forceful reds, blues, and blacks vigorously applied to canvases that literally smell like oil and have tape and dirt embedded in them, says Klemm. Murillo sewed together canvases from a previous series, Catalyst (2017), reworking and obfuscating his past work.
“A lot of people see them and think of abstract expressionism, and it’s kind of as far away from that as possible—he’s trying to create the opposite of art for art’s sake,” says Klemm. “Art exists in a market, in a system, in the economic world. He’s trying to showcase the labor that exists in a painting. He thinks of it as labor, rather than a burst of creativity.”
For Murillo, say Klemm, art can’t exist outside politics, outside of work and community and protest. He fights, she says, against a false sense of neutrality in art. “The word ‘manifestation’ in many romance languages is synonymous with protest,” says Klemm. “The manifestation of political power, opposition to that power, the ability to come together. That also translates to the bodily experience of protest, or gathering, or resisting.”
The past few years have seen uprisings in social justice and protest movements, as well as a reckoning with how labor functions in society during the global pause brought on by the pandemic, as well as the class divisions laid bare by the uneven return to work. Murillo, says Klemm, has “always been interested in how neoliberal systems cover up reality. The pandemic stripped away some of that. The supply chain, labor, how it’s at a human cost—Oscar’s been thinking about that stuff for a really long time. The pandemic has allowed a lot more people to have that veil pulled away.”
In addition to the paintings, several pieces from another Murillo project, Frequencies, are on display throughout the permanent collection galleries. For that piece, the desks of school children ages 10 to 16 were covered in canvas for several months, and the resulting works enter his global archive. (Students in St. Louis are currently participating in the project.)
“They’re so different,” says Klemm. “There’s one I unpacked yesterday, someone had drawn a really clear rendering of the Taj Mahal. Another one was just all people’s names and graffiti and math equations.” Having that project as part of the show, she says, was “really important to us too because it really sort of collapse some of these hierarchies, to have works by 10- to 16-year-olds, kids, within the galleries. Artists start somewhere.”
Currents 121: Oscar Murillo runs March 18–August 28 inside the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Gallery 250 and the Gary C. Werths and Richard Frimel Gallery 249.
