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November 2019

Oscar Murillo at Kunstverein in Hamburg and Aspen Art Museum

Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

On class, race, art, and the Colombian and African diasporas

Oscar Murillo and Charles Henry Rowell

December 3, 2019

Turner Prize 2019 Winners Announced

It has been announced that the Turner Prize 2019 has been awarded, for the first time in its history, to a collective bringing together the four nominated artists: Oscar Murillo, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Tai Shani.

The decision was made after the four artists contacted the jury to ask for the prize to be awarded to them as a collective, stating: “At this time of political crisis in Britain and much of the world, when there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity—in art as in society.”

Featuring solo presentations by all four artists, the 

 is on view at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK, through January 12, 2020.

Murillo was nominated by an independent panel of judges based on two recent exhibitions of his work: 

, at chi K11 art museum, in Shanghai, as well as for his participation in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 

, in 2018. The artist presents a new site specific installation of unstretched canvases and effigies in the Turner Prize exhibition.

Current exhibitions of Murillo's work include 

Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity

, on view through January 26, 2020, at Kunstverein in Hamburg, 

 at Aspen Art museum through May 17, 2020, and 

, a group show at Museum Ludwig, Cologne through January 19, 2020.

Images: Installation view, Oscar Murillo's presentation in the Turner Prize exhibition, Margate, UK, 2019
Cover Image: Oscar Murillo, 2016 (detail). Photo by Joo Yongsung

September 28, 2019–January 12, 2020

Oscar Murillo in the 2019 Turner Prize Exhibition

TIME’s List of the Next 100 Most influential People in the World

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Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings

On Luc Tuymans: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings

Interview with the Editor: Eva Meyer-Hermann

Explore the Exhibition

“I want to be the mediator between Plato and Shakira”

"The actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus remembers her father, William Louis-Dreyfus, swearing on the phone in the 1990s as he almost got outbid on a painting by Bill Traylor, the Alabama artist born into slavery who took up drawing around age 85.

'He amassed quite a number of them,' she said of the works, which the artist made with scraps of cardboard as his canvas, using poster paint, charcoal and pencil. 'He really likened Traylor to the greats—the Giacomettis, the Kandinskys.'

Forty of those Traylors will go on view at the David Zwirner Gallery’s Upper East Side space on Tuesday in an exhibition whose proceeds will mostly go toward the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit organization that seeks to break the cycle of poverty for youngsters in Central Harlem through education.

The show includes prime examples of Traylor’s signature style—elegantly spare, alternately buoyant and elegiac. Despite their stick-figure minimalism, the characters in his paintings and drawings have personality; his rabbits, birds and dogs seem to move through space.

'They’re almost modern in composition,' Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said, “and they have a joyfulness that reminds me of my father at his best.'"

 is on view through February 8, 2020 at 34 East 69th Street, New York.

Image: Alabama artist Bill Traylor working under a shade tree in a Montgomery neighborhood, 1946. Photo courtesy of the Alabama State Council on the Arts

The New York Times, feature by Robin Pogrebin

“He likened Traylor to the greats—the Giacomettis, the Kandinskys.”

A drawing by Bill Traylor, titled Blue Rabbit Running, dated 1939-1942.

The following excerpts are taken from an interview with Jason Rhoades conducted by journalist Javier Díaz-Guardiola, during a press conference at the opening of 

at CAC Málaga, in 2006. Music by Shakira played in the background while the artist walked members of the press through the installation.

 is on view at 519 West 19th Street, New York, through December 7, 2019.

You say that your work must not be understood as isolated pieces, but rather as the result of a process. What are we talking about exactly?

It is about life. I am interested in each and all of the connections that happen in life. I want to see everything as a continuum, but not like those artistic works that sometimes look like a salami that the artists are slicing up and taking to the market. l am fighting to make interconnections possible, and because things inspire me to create a work. My insecurity is probably part of the process. Maybe that’s why I do not want to forget things and I do not want things to forget about me. You might think that, as an artist, you are always present in your work, but we must fight to maintain the connection between the work, oneself, the first observer and the last. And the fact that the whole thing is part of a movement.

What does this accumulation of objects—whether they are found, built, bought or collected—actually represent?

Basically, this is my way of understanding culture and continuing it. lt all comes from my being a real workaholic and life giving me the opportunity to develop without problems. I also think that things have not gone bad for me at all and that I have been able to take advantage of the opportunities that were offered to me. I am a handyman, and think that I [could] survive a war or a crisis without difficulty. l don’t know how long that will last, because I am a person who likes to take a lot of risks. I do not like objects for objects’ sake. It always amazed me that a tourist would be able to get what he buys as a souvenir on a trip. That led me to reproduce his behavior in order to try and understand it. Behind the purchase of this or that object surely there always is a reason—lots of stories and lies—but the important thing is that this accumulated mess expresses a value we associate with culture and [that] it is necessary to defend a concept of culture that goes much further than soccer, Google, or french fries. I am not a person who likes art too much, but merely someone who is consumed by his work, by himself—a narcissist, no doubt about it—with a big superego.

In this installation there is a mixture of sex, fetishism, religion, and consumerism. What do all those concepts mean to you?

I am very fond of mysteries, and I try to unravel them, just like trying to grasp the big stories. They are, in turn, full of little stories and characters who star in them, and in the end they are all intertwined with each other. lt would be a very complex exercise for me to try to express anecdotes, because it also is more difficult to transfer those from one culture to another. It is the big stories we continue to write and rediscover and that we focus on, since those are the ones that help us communicate—that share a universal language. Perhaps I am focusing on my work in personal matters, but everything ends up being related to the big stories, and this is something that enables a culture’s strength, and allows it to have a dialogue with other cultures. China, for instance, fascinates me. It is the current challenge the US has to confront, and we must start to establish ways to come together and meet with that country as soon as possible.

You say they don’t take you seriously. However, in the presentation of this piece, you mentioned that the entire history of art can be condensed into one rap song. That is a very serious thought.

That thought is almost a life philosophy. I would love to be much more pop, and that pop would in turn be taken much more seriously. Maybe that is why I consider myself a mediator between Plato and Shakira—the Colombian singer—a kind of processor of popular culture. l don’t need to fear what is behind me, although I know it will end up devouring me. That is what happened to me in Tijuana, where I experienced violent situations that instilled fear in me. But I forced myself to undergo that fear

Your interest in Islam and the meeting of cultures led you to call this installation 

There are a lot of things that put all those concepts together. Los Angeles, Tijuana, Tangier, and Málaga are border towns. The distance between Los Angeles and Tangier, and between Tijuana and Málaga, must be similar—there is an intellectual link—plus it was Spanish culture that gave rise to Tijuana and, up to a certain point, you could talk about the cultural impact of the US on Tangier.... Surely you can talk of cultural cross-fertilization between those four places, which to me is all the poetry I need to work with.

This month sees the opening of large-scale solo exhibitions by 

, on view from November 8, 2019, to January 26, 2020, at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Murillo has transformed the museum’s main hall into an agora (or marketplace), reflecting his enduring belief in geographic, cultural, and sociopolitical solidarity. Large canvases from the artist’s 

 series, which debuted at the London gallery this past June, will be presented along with examples of his effigies—human-scale stuffed figures that relate to the artist's ongoing reflection on the life of workers. As part of the exhibition, visitors are invited to sit on stepped structures similar to sports-stadium benches (also shown in 

), which double as seating for the events programmed during the show and offer a vantage point from which visitors can survey the “agora” scene. The exhibition has been organized in cooperation with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England, where 

 was presented earlier this year. An artist’s book published by Kettle's Yard and Kunstverein will give an overview of Murillo’s practice in 2019, with prominence given to the artist’s solo exhibitions at the two institutions.

Open between November 23, 2019, and May 17, 2020, at Aspen Art Museum, 

 presents a new body of work including large-scale paintings and a video. As a multisensory experience, the show is intended to mobilize visitors to actively engage with current cultural concerns—among them the social dynamics of globalization and the ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced and circulated in today’s world.

Oscar Murillo, Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity

, installation view: Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, 2019. Photo by Fred Dott

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.