These shroud-like sheets of cloth cover other questionable existences, alluding to a catastrophic reality, intangible in time, place, and history.

(Oscar Murillo)

Gagosian is pleased to announce Marks and whispers, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and a film by Oscar Murillo, opening at the gallery’s Rome location on April 12, 2024. The exhibition emphasizes the formal, political, and social dimensions of the color red in Murillo’s work of the last decade . Murillo is known for expansive canvases, constructed from stitched-together elements, which incorporate elements of gesture, text, and studio detritus. He also produces books, drawings, sculptural installations, and videos that deconstruct and map flows of populations, power, and resources in currents of globalization and cultural exchange. Through each strand of his practice, Murillo probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, and demonstrates a commitment to the power of material presence.

Each work in Marks and whispers stands as a witness, suggesting fragility, despair, vulnerability, and precariousness. Hung on freestanding walls, the paintings activate the gallery’s ovoid rotunda, their surfaces, layered with arresting hues of red, hinting at anguish in a world of richness. Veil-like layers of delicate cloth shroud their mirroring sides, reflecting the intense labor of painting and transforming the walls into vessels of subdued memory.

Presented as an arena or amphitheater, the space of the gallery frames Murillo’s paintings as participants in a collective discourse, their intervened inner walls bringing into dialogue various gestures present throughout his practice. These interventions recall the artist’s 2015 suspension of black canvas from the ceiling of the Giardini’s central pavilion in All the world’s futures at the 56th Biennale di Venezia and, more recently, his installations at Fondazione Memmo, Rome, in 2021, and at Wiels, Brussels, and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, in 2024.

In Murillo’s short film Wrapped (2024), the same cloths that obscure the reverse sides of the walls appear bundled and tightly bound into an elongated form contained in a plastic crate, no longer delicate, now disfigured. In the film, Murillo kicks the bundle of fabric through the streets of Rome with no apparent destination. This work manifests the casual yet violent nature of uncertainty and reflects Murillo’s interrogative and multifaceted practice.

From July 20 to August 26, Murillo will present a newly commissioned installation, The flooded garden, at Tate Modern, London, as part of the UNIQLO Tate Play program. Concurrent to the Rome exhibition, Murillo is the subject of exhibitions at the Museo Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Wiels, Brussels; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.

Oscar Murillo was born in 1986 in Colombia and lives and works in various locations. Collections include the Fondazione Prada, Milan; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Arts Council Collection, England; Tate, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rubell Museum, Miami; Seattle Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Exhibitions include South London Gallery (2013); Centro Cultural Daoíz y Velarde, Madrid (2015); Artpace, San Antonio (2015); Estructuras resonantes, CAPC musé e d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2017); Capsule 07, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017–18); Violent Amnesia, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, England (2019); Social Altitude, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2019–20); Spirits and Gestures, Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2021–22); and A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise, Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Venice (2022). Murillo participated in the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015) and shared the Turner Prize (2019).