Oscar Murillo (b. 1986)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Oscar Murillo (b. 1986)

Untitled

Details
Oscar Murillo (b. 1986)
Untitled
oil, oil stick, graphite and dirt on canvas
75 x 67in. (190.5 x 170cm.)
Executed in 2011
Provenance
Carlos Ishikawa, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011.
Exhibited
London, Saatchi Gallery, Pangaea: New Art from Africa, 2014.
Special Notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 20% is payable on hammer price and buyer's premium

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Lot Essay

With its frenetic spirals, scribbles and graffiti-like scrawls, Oscar Murillo’s Untitled is a dynamic work from the artist’s early practice that encapsulates his fascination with materiality and process. Bisected vertically and horizontally into a quartered grid, smudged and smeared with indigo, cadmium red and orange pigment, alongside dirt from his studio floor, Untitled is a testament to the artist’s ‘desire to inhabit an environment where the multiple realities of that space, say, its materiality, its potential usages, its history, are all simultaneously active’ (O. Murillo, quoted in C. Wood, ‘Dirty Painting’, in Mousse Magazine, no. 35, October 2012, p. 107). Although Murillo may execute a painting in a matter of hours, the process leading to its creation can take months; cut up and stitched together in different sections, folded, unfolded, left to assimilate studio debris, Murillo allows the environment of his studio to accumulate on his canvas. Recording the process of their making, Murillo sees his work as a permanent archive of his practice. ‘I don’t work on a painting with the goal of finishing it or having a complete and finished painting at the end of a work process’, the artist has explained, ‘The idea is to get through as much material as possible, and various materials go through various processes. In most parts there is this mark making that happens with a broomstick and oil paint. I make a bunch of those canvases, fold them in half, and put them on the floor. My studio is a cradle of dust and dirt, of pollution. I don’t tidy up at the end of each production process. It’s all very much on purpose; it’s continuous process, a machine of which I’m the catalyst. Things get moved around, I step on them, and they get contaminated. It’s not about leaving traces, it’s about letting things mature on their own’ (O. Murillo, quoted in L. Russell, ‘Oscar Murillo’, in BOMB Magazine, https://bombmagazine. org/article/6921/oscar-murillo [accessed 22nd December 2014]). Born in Colombia but brought up in London, Murillo’s work explores concepts of distance, dislocation and the meaning of community. The passage of material from studio floor to canvas marks the artist’s concern with his cross-cultural heritage and wider social themes of migration and displacement. While his work has drawn comparisons with Cy Twombly’s schismatic gestures, Murillo has expressed admiration for Leon Golub and Dieter Roth, artists who, for him, have obliterated the canvas and lived through their work. Out of their legacy, in works like Untitled, Murillo constructs a new painting that addresses the ephemera and transience of the modern world. Work by Murillo is currently included in the group exhibition, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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