Oscar Murillo

Oscar Murillo (born 1986, La Paila, Colombia) is a contemporary artist whose expansive, multidisciplinary practice examines labor, migration, globalization, and collective identity. Raised in Colombia before relocating to London at a young age, Murillo’s work is deeply informed by transnational movement and the social conditions of working-class communities. His paintings, installations, performances, and participatory projects frequently incorporate raw canvas, industrial debris, stitched fabric, dirt, and text, reflecting both material histories and lived experience. Murillo first gained international attention for his large-scale abstract canvases, which often evoke factory floors, protest banners, or architectural remnants. These works combine gestural abstraction with fragments of language and layered surfaces, emphasizing process, labor, and the politics of production. Over time, his practice has expanded to include immersive installations and socially engaged projects, most notably Frequencies, an ongoing global initiative that distributes canvases to schoolchildren worldwide, inviting collective mark-making as a record of shared experience across cultures. His work consistently blurs distinctions between abstraction and social documentation, studio production and collective authorship. Murillo’s installations often transform gallery spaces into sites of communal gathering or industrial tension, foregrounding questions of belonging, precarity, and economic systems. In 2019, he was one of four artists awarded the Turner Prize collectively, reflecting his commitment to collaboration and shared authorship. Murillo has exhibited widely at major international institutions and biennials, and his work is held in prominent museum collections. He lives and works between London and La Paila, Colombia.