Lot 33: AR Oscar Murillo (B. 1986)

Oscar Murillo (B. 1986)
Untitled (Fried Chick), 2012oil, oil stick, spray paint and dirt on canvas 248 x 181 cm.97 5/8 x 71 1/4 in.

Provenance: Private Collection, LAAcquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2013Compelling, spirited and grand in scale, Untitled (Fried Chick) (2012) is foundational work by the Colombian-born, Turner Prize nominated artist Oscar Murillo; exhibiting all the hallmarks of his energetic and spontaneous style that combines raw panels of canvas, flashes of text and colour with aggregated dirt and impressions from the studio floor. Rising to artistic maturity and institutional acclaim in monumental fashion, his inclusion in such major exhibitions as The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2014, in addition to solo exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Daoíz y Velarde, Madrid and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, has cemented Murillo's international standing as one of the foremost contemporary painters currently working; culminating in his nomination for the Turner Prize in 2019 for his exhibition Violent Amnesia at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Activating the more static, Modernist modes of abstract painting through installations, social gatherings and interactive artworks, Murillo's multifaceted practice has continued to express the artist's experiences of displacement and multiculturalism, demonstrated in the present work with a bravura charm and dynamic materiality. For Murillo, the process of painting provides a method of accumulation; composing his works through a build-up of material, of folds, marks and daubs of paint that illustrate the artist's own relationship to his itinerant lifestyle and "layering" of identity. Born in La Paila in South East Colombia, Murillo remains deeply influenced by his roots and his arrival in London as an immigrant at the age of ten. The present work represents a superbly nuanced evocation of these themes, employing single words or phrases that encourage a reading of Murillo's paintings through the lens of cultural critique. Where words such as 'pollo,' 'yoga,' 'milk' and 'mango' appear across Murillo's oeuvre, they become aesthetic devices in tandem with their implicit meaning – impactful hand-sketched lines of text that divide the canvas in a similar vein to the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Murillo interprets his own unique style thusly: "the words are very displaced. Like cultural displacement with performance, in painting it's material displacement, object displacement [...] I also like to think that these paintings also imply a displacement of time. They're like rugs. An unstretched painting is a kind of abstract thing, one that suggests that it perhaps has been found or comes from some other space or time. But while it has this aura of being a historical thing when placed out of context, it just comes from the studio" (Oscar Murillo in conversation with Legacy Russell, Bomb Magazine, No. 122, Winter 2013, online).Untitled (Fried Chick) is an elegant example of Murillo's collaging of surfaces and techniques that flaunts the dirt from the artist's studio floor, bringing the painting to life through its closeness to the "authentic" detritus and rubble of Murillo's workspace. In the present work, the raw support of the canvas plays host to an almost performative mark-making, suffused with a palpable energy that channels the automatic motions of Jackson Pollock, complemented by a revisionist ideology that Murillo credits to the Neo-concretism of Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica. The present work comes to market following Murillo's nomination for the Turner Prize in 2019 – a significant recognition of the artist's distinguished practice and place amongst his contemporaries. An exemplary early work by Murillo, Untitled (Fried Chick) is an immense painting of masterful austerity, eliciting all of the methods and conceptual hooks that has made Murillo such an internationally lauded artist.