I remember being in La Paila, Colombia, aged 10 years old, and my dad saying he wanted to travel to the UK. I am looking at this map of the world, and find this tiny little island, which looks to me like it’s in the middle of nowhere. Six months later we find ourselves there, my family totally uprooted, and Cardinal Pole school became this family... – Oscar Murillo
Disrupted Frequencies
In this series of paintings, Disrupted Frequencies, Murillo 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 ‘obliteration’ force of water.
These new works, as their title suggests, are an intentional disruption of the organising impulse of the archive. Pulling canvases from different countries together, Murillo consciously creates friction with the idea of the archive. Each individual painting’s title contains the names of the countries its component canvases originate from, deliberately creating tension through the splicing together of objects from different geographical and social contexts. Further intensity is added through layers of blue paint, which both erase and reveal the original mark-making. Recalling both the ocean and the air, they come to symbolise geo-political connections and disconnections.
Family and Youth Workshops
A series of creative, interactive and participatory workshops exploring the work of artist Oscar Murillo, were held on the weekends during the Frequencies exhibition.
All workshops were co-created and co-delivered by the students of Cardinal Pole Catholic School.
The workshops were in the ‘Agora’ at the centre of the exhibition.
If you were unable to attend the workshops for whichever reason, you can still creatively and interactively engage with Frequencies and its themes by downloading our educational online toolkit.
Oscar Murillo
Born in La Paila, Colombia in 1986, Oscar Murillo moved with his parents to London when he was 10 years old. He studied at Cardinal Pole Catholic School in Hackney between the ages of 11 and 18, before going to art school. His main studio is based in north-east London. Since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, he has been closely involved in humanitarian work in Colombia.
Over the past decade, Murillo has become known for a practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. Taken as a whole, his work emphasises the many ways in which ideas, visual languages and everyday items are in a state of flux: displaced, in circulation, and intermingling.
Recent one-person exhibitions include ‘Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity’ at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, 2019–2020, ‘Oscar Murillo’, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2017–2018, and at CAPC (Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts), Bordeaux, 2017. Murillo shared the 2019 Turner Prize alongside Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Tai Shani.
Fascinating... surely one of the most unusual shows of the summer. – Chris Harvey, The Telegraph
At intervals along the shelving stacks are big paintings by Murillo himself: strong, beautiful, blue abstractions daubed on top of schoolkids' doodles. The art he has made out of his encounter with global teenagedom is bold and confident, and of course highly skilled. – Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 26 July 2021
The exhibition includes a new series of paintings by Murillo titled Disrupted Frequencies, featuring multiple Frequencies canvases stitched together. What makes these canvases staggering is the mixture of the conscious and unconscious energy of young minds. – Balasz Takac, Widewalls, 26 July 2021
National characteristics emerge: pop culture infuses the canvases from Japan; Murillo identifies an anarchic energy in those from Chile and Argentina. Yet the Chinese canvases are perhaps the most distinctive. – Chris Harvey, The Telegraph, 25 July 2021
The canvases feature universally recognised names (Beyoncé, Ronaldo, One Direction) and images (hearts, rainbows, skulls) alongside local cultural references – the result of a project that is both a local and global endeavour. – Mark Westall, FAD Magazine, 23 July 2021
The inner lives, interests and obsessions of more than 100,000 school children from around the world have been gathered by the Turner prize winner Oscar Murillo and put on display at his old school. – Mark Brown, The Guardian, 23 July 2021
Credits
Commissioned and produced by Artangel in collaboration with Frequencies Project.
With thanks to Cardinal Pole Catholic School.
Generously supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Supported by the Ampersand Foundation, The London Community Foundation, Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, and Special Angels for Frequencies: Catherine Petitgas, Danny and Manizeh Rimer, and David Zwirner.
Artangel is generously supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.
