WIELS, Brussels
February, 2024
February 2–April 28, 2024
The ocean, the sea, or any liquid mass has the capability to create and erase itself with each new wave that surfaces. Oscar Murillo’s practice relates in many ways to the oscillating force of water, an infinite flow of conception and undoing, pointing to his interest in the notion of cultural exchange and the circulation of ideas, languages and objects.
Further permeating the WIELS galleries are a large number of mass-produced plastic garden chairs, rock-like sculpture formations made from ground corn and cement, a series of Flight drawings and a mesmerizing film shot in the early hours of new year's eve in Colombia. They similarly reflect his preoccupation with the late capitalist exchange of people and goods, which includes questions around class, systems of production, and labor.
The exhibition at WIELS marks the termination of the artist’s ongoing Frequencies project and ushers in a new phase that sees the collection of canvases and the memories they hold flattened into raw material mass, used as a resource for new works, provocatively disrupting the intellectual project of an archive. Through the splicing of objects from different geographical, social and cultural contexts, Murillo creates friction and unease. It points to his deep-seated urge to obliterate the weight of time and geography, and allow a polyphonic stream of consciousness to breach the levee.
Learn more at WIELS.