Exhibition

Oscar Murillo. Binary Function

10 Oct 2015 – 20 Nov 2015

Regular hours

Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00

Save Event: Oscar Murillo. Binary Function2

I've seen this1

People who have saved this event:

close

David Zwirner | London

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Green Park
Directions via Google Maps Directions via Citymapper
Event map

David Zwirner is pleased to present Oscar Murillo’s first exhibition at the gallery in London, which includes new paintings and drawings as well as sculptural, sound, and film elements.

About

The exhibition’s title, binary function, refers to the pairings that permeate Murillo’s multifaceted practice. For the artist, the notion of the binary is not oppositional; instead, these pairings work and play against one another to create a dialogue that exceeds individual works.

binary function continues this thread of Murillo’s practice, in which conceptual dialogues manifest themselves through the artist’s engagement with materials. The exhibition includes a new video projection that depicts a street scene in Murillo’s hometown of La Paila, Colombia, in which people are seen chatting, drinking, and dancing to live music. Filmed by the artist on New Year’s Day, its footage shifts between documentary and experimental styles, using both wide-angle and detail shots that, at times, abstract the figures’ bodies into a chaotic arrangement of imagery, color, and movement. Murillo employs sound as a major, integral component of the work: its soundtrack fades between the original audio and a commissioned score, interweaving loud, jarring street noise with tempered bell-like harmonies. The audio will be played throughout the exhibition space, creating an architecture of sound whose ambience acts as a transition between the depicted scene and the exhibition at large, and complements the physicality of the adjoining installations.

The large-scale, seemingly frenetic paintings, for which Murillo has become widely known, develop gradually and often incorporate materials that change and react over time, with canvases literally moved around his studio to accumulate sole imprints, fingerprints, and dust. Just as the material conditions of the studio in this way become inseparable from the finished artwork, Murillo invites viewers to approach their physical engagement with the gallery space as part of the viewing process. As such, they become implicated within the dual process of production and consumption.

The exhibition continues a recent development within Murillo’s practice in which multimedia works are grouped together within clear plastic tray frames. Comprising wide-ranging imagery and materials, including small-scale drawings, screen prints, and the artist’s own travel photographs, these compositions vary in their degree of engagement with the processes of painting, drawing, screen printing, and installation. They can thus be seen as visual primers for the works in the show as well as Murillo’s own creative process; the artist regularly refers to his paintings in terms of drawing, and his studio practice at large integrates various forms of printmaking.

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Oscar Murillo

Comments

Have you been to this event? Share your insights and give it a review below.