Black drapes, large patchwork paintings, metal constructs that remind of autopsy tables and rock-like sculpture made of corn and clay. The visual language chosen by Oscar Murillo (La Paila, Colombia, 1986), one of the winners of the 2019 Turner Prize, comprises recurrent elements and motifs that explicate in a wide array of media, including painting, video, installation, and performance art. All of his art can be seen as a continuous, evolving inquiry on the notion of community, extracting its conceptual source material from personal, inter-cultural relationships in a transnational movement that is integral to Murillo’s art practice.

In this sense, his emblematic piece Frequencies is a global art project the artist created in 2013. Murillo visited, together with co-creators, schools all around the world and covered desks therein with canvases. His only request was they stay there for four months. He also invited the students, aged 10 to 16, to do as they pleased with the canvases: drawing, doodling, writing – anything. Over the last nine years, Frequencies evolved into a large global archive of 350 schools in over 30 countries, including Brazil, China, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nepal, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, Britain, the USA, and many others. To date, over 100,000 students contributed to the project. Collectively, the canvas show geometrical motifs, universally understandable messages, and culturally-specific expression.

This is a very large project of dilated geographical boundaries. It is global and local at once, and now arrives, in processed form, in Venice, at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia on September 17. Oscar Murrillo will present A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise, an installation that includes a series of paintings and a large selection of the Frequencies series canvases. Murillo also worked on ways to share this archive at an international level and to promote accessibility to its rich content. Digital and physical interactions are also part of the project. The exhibition in Venice is such an example.