Oscar Murillo, a Colombian-born Londoner, still just 29, has had a remarkable rise to prominence.
In 2012 he was getting up at four every morning to do a cleaning job to support his work as an artist; in 2013 his paintings—teeming with loose, scratchy, expressive marks, patches of pure colour, and daily dust and grime from the studio, scrawled with words such as burrito, yuka and chorizo—started reaching six-figure sums. The following year they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, right now, his black collaged canvases hang, like ominous flags, over the entrance of the Venice Biennale, the art world's most prestigious exhibition.
Murillo is well aware that eyes will be upon him when his show opens tomorrow at the London gallery of David Zwirner, one of the world's leading international art dealers. "They call it the Frieze slot," he says with a laugh. "And with that you maximise attention, because people fly from all different parts of the world to come to the fair and the shows around that time." But he's undaunted and sees it as a great opportunity. "It will be interesting because it is almost like the first show after a period that was very turbulent."
We meet at a Colombian café in Seven Sisters, near where Murillo lives with his partner and two young daughters, and close to his new studio, a vast warehouse tucked in a quiet backstreet nearby. Murillo eats here nearly every day, he says, but not the Bandeja Paisa, a Colombian speciality we share—a plate of rice and beans, avocado salad, chorizo, steak and belly pork. "It's like a heart attack," he says. "I try not to have it so often."
It's a fitting lunch, however, because Murillo's Colombian background underpins almost everything he does, infusing his work in various guises. He was born in La Paila, a village in western Colombia, where his parents both worked in local factories. His father was from an indigenous Colombian family and both his mother's parents were Afro-Colombian. "In the Nineties, despite all the negativity that exists around Colombia through the Eighties, I couldn't have had a more idyllic upbringing," he says. "And I think that was due to the fact that it was a very rural existence—the sugar fields, the rivers. I guess, in retrospect, one romanticises."