This year Oscar Murillo is featured in Unlimited, Art Basel's pioneering exhibition platform for projects that transcend the classical art fair stand, providing the opportunity to present monumental installations, colossal sculptures, and boundless wall paintings. 

Disrupted Frequencies builds upon Murillo’s long-term collaborative project with school students, Frequencies. Initiated in 2013, Frequencies involves visiting schools around the world to install pieces of raw canvas on classroom desks and inviting students to freely draw, write on and mark their surfaces. The canvases, with their accumulated intentional and non-intentional marks, are collected after approximately six months of ‘sedimentation’ in the classroom.

The impetus for Frequencies came in part from a chance encounter when Murillo visited his own former school as an adult, and noticed the densely graffitied wooden desks, sparking memories of adolescence; the desire to break free from the normative environment of education and the release found in drawing and mark-making. Identifying with the students, Murillo approached the project as a collaboration between himself and the many participants, and in this recent series of paintings, has repurposed canvases from the archive and added his own marks to them.

Stitching together pieces of canvas – a technique characteristic of Murillo’s practice – the artist has worked directly onto a patchworked surface with oil bars in varying shades of blue. The works recall Murillo’s Surge series, which also features dense fields of blue in wave-like formations, flooding the paintings’ planes, with an effect that Murillo has likened to the force of "obliteration" of water.

These new works, as their title suggests, are an intentional disruption of the intellectual project of an archive. Pulling canvases from different regions together, Murillo consciously engage with the complexities, and creates friction within archival practices. Each individual painting’s title contains the names of the countries its component canvases originate from (Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, Nepal, Malaysia, India, China, Egypt, United States, Morocco, Philippines, Germany, United Kingdom), deliberately creating tension though the splicing together of objects from different geographical, social and cultural contexts. Further intensity is added through the intervention of the blue painted planes, which for Murillo act to both erase, and to reveal. Recalling both the ocean and the air, they come to question that which binds geographical space, imagining new carved territories.

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+info: karensofie@kurimanzutto.com

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