ART CITIES: Athens-Oscar Murillo

Oscar 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

“A Telegram to My Dear Suki” continues Oscar Murillo’s evolving exploration of collective authorship, layered expression, and the sociopolitical charge of mark-making. This exhibition builds upon a lineage of recent projects such as “The Flooded Garden” at Tate Modern (2024), and “Espíritus en el Pantano”, currently on view at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico. In each of these, Murillo has transformed the institutional space into a living, participatory environment—inviting audiences to leave their own gestures upon canvases distributed throughout the gallery. These interventions render the museum not as a passive container, but as an activated social field—a site where the complexities of collectivity, communion, and cultural exchange are both celebrated and interrogated. In the exhibition in Athens, Murillo turns his attention to the communicative power—and inherent fragility—of the individual gesture. Here, a single mark on a surface becomes an act of transmission, charged with potential to be echoed, disrupted, or reimagined by others. These themes of transmission, rupture, and resonance take on heightened urgency within today’s turbulent cultural and political landscape. Central to the exhibition are Murillo’s “Flight” drawings (2012–), created while traveling by plane. Executed on both sides of small or folded sheets of paper using humble materials—pen, pencil, and carbon paper—these works are dense, intuitive, and textural. Their layered surfaces are filled with spontaneous inscriptions and obscured phrases, evoking a language that hovers between articulation and erasure. Rooted in the traditions of automatism, these drawings embody an unfiltered, liberated form of expression—private yet performative, intimate yet impersonal. This sense of gesture-as-communication extends into Murillo’s video series “Echoing Spirits” (2022–), which documents ephemeral performances from the past three years. In these works, the Flight drawings become visual scores or instruments—vehicles through which presence, movement, and sound are translated into new forms of interaction. The videos emphasize the temporal and relational nature of Murillo’s practice, underscoring the ways in which marks, like messages, reverberate across time and space. The exhibition also features selections from the “Telegram” paintings (2013–), which draw upon the extensive archive generated by Murillo’s “Frequencies” project. Launched in 2013, “Frequencies” involved placing raw canvases on school desks around the world, inviting students to unconsciously inscribe them over time. These accumulated markings—part doodle, part diary—form the foundation for the Telegram series, where spontaneous expression is reframed as data, memory, and artistic substrate. Finally, a suite of “surge (social cataracts)” paintings (2018–) brings the exhibition to a crescendo. These works, dominated by rhythmic waves of blue oil stick, evoke both flood and fracture. The dense, enveloping surfaces overwhelm the eye, simulating the experience of communicative breakdown. Yet within this visual deluge lies a generative tension: water as both obliterating force and cleansing agent. Here, Murillo suggests that within disintegration lies the seed of renewal—a clearing away of noise and confusion, making space for something new to emerge. Together, the works in “A Telegram to My Dear Suki” trace an intricate map of communication and disconnection, intimacy and collectivity, memory and renewal. Murillo positions the gesture—not merely as mark, but as message, echo, and invocation—as the central agent in this ever-evolving language of encounter.

Photo: Oscar Murillo, flight #98, 2018, detail, Pen, pencil and graphite on paper, in artists frame, 12 1/4 x 16 1/2 inches (30.9 x 41.9 cm), © Oscar Murillo, Photo: Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian, 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athens, Greece, Duration: 20/6-30/8/2025. Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, https://gagosian.com/