This summer, artist Oscar Murillo will invite visitors of all ages to make their mark on a vast, layered painting in the Turbine Hall.
Part of UNIQLO Tate Play, The flooded garden will encourage visitors to paint water and waves over monumental canvases, creating a collaborative painting of epic proportions. The installation takes inspiration from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies depicting his garden in Giverny, France, while building on Murillo’s series of Surge works, which feature gestural strokes in oil paint flowing across the canvas like water.
Visitors will enter a curved structure framed by towering walls of canvas that have been populated with hundreds of hand-drawn messages and drawings by international visitors to Tate Modern. Audiences are invited to layer wave-like brushstrokes atop the canvases, with their gestures flowing together to create The flooded garden, painting in hues of deep blues, bright yellows and pinks. These continually evolving collaborative paintings will then remain on display in the Turbine Hall for all to see.
A display of Murillo’s own works in Tate Modern’s South Tank will provide further inspiration for visitors, expanding and reflecting on the themes explored in the artist’s Surge series. Influenced by Claude Monet’s celebrated Water Lilies paintings, created while Monet was experiencing cataracts, Murillo draws similarities between this loss of sight and the way people can be ‘socially blind’ – impeding our ability to truly understand one another. Murillo calls this idea ‘social cataracts’, explaining ‘we are in this kind of blinded existence, the façade of beauty’. Having first exhibited Surge works in 2019, Murillo continued to develop the series during the global pandemic. Unable to travel, he spent this time in his hometown in Colombia, where he divided his time between the studio and working with his community, in what he describes as a time of “social collapse”.
On show in the South Tank will be a survey of this series over the years, varying in scale from monumental to more intimate examples. Murillo’s site-specific Mesmerizing Beauty 2024 installation will flood the centre of the space with white plastic garden chairs holding framed works on paper, bearing the artist’s distinctive, flowing marks in oil paint. Often incorporated into Murillo’s exhibitions and performances, these simple chairs evoke informal community or family gatherings and have strong connotations of something easily discarded. Encircled by a multi-panelled installation of the artist’s Surge (social cataracts) 2019-2024 paintings, suspended from the ceiling, the artist’s layered blue gestures flow cyclically around the space, symbolic of the connecting fluidity of water, and mirroring the curved interactive structures in the Turbine Hall.
UNIQLO Tate Play: Oscar Murillo: The flooded garden is curated by Rosalie Doubal, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance & Participation), Molly Molloy, Senior Curator (Early Years and Families), Gina Tsang, Curator (Early Years and Families), Lydia Pool, Assistant Curator (Early Years and Families) and Jess Baxter, Assistant Curator, International Art, and produced by Simon Lenkiewicz.
UNIQLO Tate Play: Oscar Murillo, 20th July 2024 – 26th August 2024, Tate Modern
About the artist
OSCAR MURILLO (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) has developed a multifaceted and challenging practice that spans painting, collaborative projects, video, sound and installation. Through each body of work, the artist probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, demonstrating a commitment to the power of material presence alongside complex meditations on contemporary society. He received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in 2012, in 2019 he was one of four artists to collectively win the prestigious Turner Prize, and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of Westminster.
Related Events: Tate Modern Late Friday 26th July 2024, 6PM – 10PM; Free: In celebration of Murillo’s UNIQLO Tate Play commission The flooded garden, an evening of talks, live music and DJ sets, with a range of food and drink also on offer.
