Oscar Murillo: Ourself behind ourself concealed

David Zwirner is pleased to present new paintings by Oscar Murillo (b. 1986) at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. The exhibition will feature large-scale canvases that extend two of the artist’s ongoing series, manifestation and news, both begun in 2018, pushing them in new directions in his ongoing effort to, in Murillo’s words, “keep a balance between my desire to think primarily about image-making and mark-making, textures and form, and this constant awareness of the world and my need to interpret it.”¹
 
Murillo’s new paintings are characteristic of his studio practice and his sustained engagement with process, as well as his continued emphasis on art-making as a means of synthesizing sociopolitical contexts. The title of this exhibition is drawn from Emily Dickinson’s 1862 poem that opens, “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—.” This literary work centers on the image of a specter within the self, a notion that connects to meditations, within Murillo’s practice, on dark forces present in both the personal and the political. The result of a physically demanding, intuitively guided approach, these dynamic compositions are imbued with a spiritual resonance that forms a thread through his works over recent years.
 
Coinciding with Currents 121: Oscar Murillo at the Saint Louis Art Museum, this will be Murillo’s seventh solo presentation with the gallery, and his third in New York. 

Presented in tandem is an online-only exhibition featuring new works on paper by the artist.

Image: Oscar Murillo, manifestation,  2020-2022 (detail)