Oscar Murillo currently presents “A Telegram to my dear Suki“, at Gagosian Gallery, Athens. Building on a sequence of recent exhibitions including The flooded garden at Tate Modern, London (2024), and Espíritus en el Pantano, which is on view at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, until August 10, 2025.

Murillo meditates on the potential and fragility of communicative mark making. A single gesture on a surface activates it, charging it with energy that may be echoed, erased, or expanded upon by another. These ideas of diffusion, exchange, connection, and rupture take on a particular urgency in the current cultural and political climate.

Included in the exhibition are examples of Murillo’s Flight drawings (2012–), works on paper produced by the artist while he is seated aboard an aircraft. Defined by their economy of materials, the results take shape on small sheets of paper, or on larger pieces that have been folded and refolded.

The tools—pen, pencil, and carbon paper—are minimal, and Murillo works on both sides of each sheet, building up densely layered compositions in which words and markings obscure each other. The drawings are intimate yet unselfconscious; inspired by automatism, they allow gesture to operate as a form of liberated communication.

Born in Colombia and based in various locations, Murillo is known for an inventive and itinerant practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos.

Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled.

Through his command of gesture, form, and spatial organization, Murillo is able to convey a complex and nuanced understanding of the specific conditions of globalization and its attendant state of flux, while nevertheless maintaining the universality of human experience within this milieu.

In recent years, Murillo has traveled extensively throughout the world to research and prepare exhibitions and other projects, making works both in the studio and in unexpected locations. As a result, airplanes, which are able to move more or less freely and without regard to borders, and the contemplative isolation afforded by these long journeys, have become an important site of production for the artist.

As Murillo explains: “Constant transnational movement has become an integral facet of my practice. Flight becomes not just a means of travel but a sacred ‘other’ space, the aeroplane seat itself becoming a unique ‘studio’ at a remove, a non-place which is both physically confined and freed from being in any real geographical location.

Within this space, during the proscribed periods of time each journey affords, I engage in notation, mark making, recording, layering gestural marks onto surfaces: sketchbooks, Japanese paper, printouts from Google Maps, landing cards. This practice becomes a process of experimentation, of accumulation, and, in a sense, of research.”

Oscar Murillo
A Telegram to my dear Suki
Gagosian Gallery
Athens
Through 30 August 2025

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