Museo Tamayo presents Oscar Murillo: Spirits in the Swamp, an exhibition in collaboration with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), curated by Taiyana Pimentel.

In this new exhibition, Murillo deepens his exploration of space as an interactive ‘swamp.’ After inviting the public to colour at MARCO, he now turns to black at the Tamayo Museum.

Oscar Murillo’s work explores ideas of collectivity and shared culture, going beyond the conventional confinements of the pictorial act by inserting itself into the dynamics of group interaction. His practice is part of a genealogy of artists who destabilize traditional hierarchies in art, turning canvas, gesture, and installation into surfaces for social inscription.

Following his solo show at The Museum of Contemporary Art Monterrey, Murillo continues his understanding of the exhibition space as an incubator for materiality and mark-making. Canvas filled with messages, marks, and drawings left by visitors to sprawls the central patio of the museum. The building itself becomes, not just a neutral container but, a stage for performance; a swamp of layered marks.

In previous participatory iterations, Murillo invited public intervention through colour, offering paint to visitors in a collective, monumental act of mark-making. In this iteration, Murillo turns to black. Scattered piles of black crayons replace paint, inviting the public to contribute with gestures of erasure. Here, Murillo’s swamp becomes obscured, shrouded in black; an ode to both obliteration and renewal, sight and blindness and consumption and purity. Large swathes of stitched and weathered black fabric—once part of Murillo's installation at the 56th Venice biennale, All the Worlds Futures—occupy the space as a latent spiritual presence hanging from the ceiling and crumpled on the floor. Overwhelming in scale, the material becomes an active participant imbued with the energy of the visitors of the museum.

Small sections of the black fabric will be ceremoniously cut and offered to members of the public throughout the duration of the show—as though spirits embedded with material history, spreading through the city.

Through Spirits in the Swamp, Murillo presents the social not as a mere depiction but as a structural force that reshapes the aesthetic experience. The exhibition probes questions of visibility, precarity, and the way art operates as a point of friction between history, memory, and collectivity.

Spirits in the Swamp is a collaboration between the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) and Museo Tamayo.

+about Oscar Murillo 

+about the exhibition