Oscar Murillo works across painting, installation, and performance, often using draped black canvases, large-scale paintings composed of stitched-together fragments, and metal structures evoking autopsy tables and rock-like sculptures formed of corn and clay. His practice can be understood as a sustained and evolving investigation of community, informed by his cross-cultural personal ties between Colombia and the UK.
His work has been compared to that of Alberto Burri, Philip Guston, and the Abstract Expressionists for its use of colour, line, and physicality.Major bodies of work include his News series, the Manifestation series, and the Surge works, all of which combine expressive mark-making with scale and colour.
Murillo's studio-based works are fundamentally tied to the environment where he produces them:
I came to the realisation that I was interested in too many things at once. Somehow the studio floor was the only available tool to communicate these interests. […] One tutor from art school once said that the way I made work, or treated the studio, reminded her of when she was growing up in post-war Britain because then there was this idea that you had to be resourceful. I grew up as a child in a village in Colombia, where there was a very similar attitude to just using what was around.
— Oscar Murillo, from interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist published in Work (Rubell Family Collection: 2012)