A large installation by Oscar Murillo, winner of the 2019 Turner Prize, is coming to Venice

Oscar Murillo (La Paila, 1986), one of the winners of the 2019 Turner Prize and among the contemporary artists of the moment, is in Venice from September 17 to November 27, 2022 with his project A Storm is Blowing from Paradise, designed specifically for the spaces of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, where it is being developed as a large-scale installation that includes a new series of paintings by the artist and a large selection of canvases from the interactive series Frequencies, the long-term collaborative project involving students from around the world.

Frequencies is a global art project conceived by Oscar Murillo in 2013. The artist and his collaborators visited schools around the world, attaching rough canvases to classroom desks with the only requirement that they remain there for the duration of a four-month term, inviting students between the ages of 10 and 16 to mark them, doodle on them, draw on them or write on them.

Over the past nine years, Frequencies has evolved into a vast global archive that includes more than 350 schools from more than thirty countries, including Brazil, China, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nepal, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and many others. To date, more than 100,000 girls and boys have contributed to the project.

As a whole, the canvases convey the conscious and unconscious energy of young minds at their most receptive, optimistic and conflicted stage. Often worked on by more than one student, the canvases return dense layers of drawings, slogans, messages and geometric patterns. The works include universally recognizable words and messages, along with culturally specific expressions, configuring themselves as the fruit of a project at once local and global.

The title of the Venetian exhibition, A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise, is taken from a passage in the 1940 volume On the Concept of History by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin: "There isa painting by Klee entitled ’Angelus Novus.’ It depicts an angel who seems about to turn away from something on which he has fixed his gaze. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open, and his wings are unfolded. The angel in the story must look like this. His face is turned to the past. There where before us appears a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe, ceaselessly heaping rubble upon rubble and throwing it at his feet. He would well like to restrain himself, to rouse the dead and reconnect the shattered. But a storm is blowing from paradise (a storm is blowing from paradise), which has caught in his wings, and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm pushes him unstoppably into the future, to which he turns his back as the pile of rubble before him grows skyward. What we call progress is this storm."

For the artist, this passage is linked to the poetics of Frequencies insofar as the sheer weight of history resides implicit in the body of work that proves so complex at the first attempt to assemble and understand this enormous accumulation of material. Although there is an ambivalence implicit in the idea of progress described in Benjamin’s passage, for Oscar Murillo Frequencies is fundamentally a hopeful work that places great optimism in future generations.

The project brings together a huge and varied volume of material collected over nearly a decade from around the world. Murillo has worked in recent years to develop new ways of sharing this archive internationally, creating opportunities for its rich content to be enjoyed, which include digital interactions and material manifestations. With A Storm Is Blowing from Paradise for the first time the general public will be able to experience some of these new interventions firsthand.

Accompanying the exhibition is a Public Program of live appointments within the exhibition, curated by SAVVY Contemporary, which is divided into four thematic chapters: DISPERSAL, CONVERGENCE, FRAGMENTATION and RECONFIGURATION.

The appointments will explore various topics, such as diaspora, Rastafarianism, the work of women memoirists, and the identification of common struggles and new senses of belonging.

On September 17, 2022, from 2 p.m. the first live events within the exhibition will take shape and the full schedule will be announced.

Oscar Murillo

Oscar Murillo has created a visual language that encompasses recurring elements and motifs; draped black canvases; large paintings composed of fragments stitched together; metal structures that evoke autopsy tables; and rock-like sculptures formed from corn and clay. These and other components are explored in a wide range of media, including painting, video works, installations, and room-sized actions.

All of the artist’s distinct works can be seen as an ongoing and evolving investigation of notions of community, informed by personal cross-cultural ties, as well as the constant transnational movement that has become an integral part of Murillo’s practice.

Oscar Murillo was born in 1986 in La Paila, Colombia, and lives and works in various locations. He received a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts from the University of Westminster in 2007 and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. In 2019, Murillo was one of four artists to collectively receive the prestigious Turner Prize.

Murillo’s most recent solo exhibitions include Currents 121: Oscar Murillo, Saint Louis Art Museum, USA (2022); Social Cataracts at KM21, The Hague, The Netherlands; Spirits and Gestures, Fondazione Memmo, Rome, Italy; Condiciones aún por titular, National University of Colombia Art Museum, Bogotá (all 2021-22); Frequencies, organized by Artangel at Cardinal Pole Catholic School, London; and MAM Project 029: Oscar Murillo, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (all 2021). Past solo exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum, USA; Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (both 2019-20); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK; K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, China (both 2019); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2017-18); Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan (2016-7); Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá; Centro Cultural Daoíz y Velarde, Madrid, Spain; Performa 15, New York, USA and Artpace, San Antonio, USA (all in 2015); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles< USA (2014) and South London Gallery, UK (2013).

Murillo is represented by Carlos/Ishikawa, Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Kurimanzutto, Taka Ishii, and David Zwirner.

A large installation by Oscar Murillo, winner of the 2019 Turner Prize, is coming to Venice

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