Leading artist Oscar Murillo will stage a large-scale installation comprising a woven panorama of Disrupted Frequencies paintings for Art Basel Unlimited.
This series of paintings come out of Frequencies, a global art project conceived by Oscar Murillo in 2013. The artist and his collaborators visited schools worldwide, fixing raw canvas to classroom desks with the sole requirement that they remain there for six months. Within the intimate space of the desk, students aged 10-16 were invited to freely mark, draw, scribble or write on the canvas in front of them. Over the past twelve years, Frequencies has grown to become a vast global project involving an infinite number of schools, in countries including Brazil, China, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nepal, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, UK, USA among many others. To date, Frequencies has been part of many groundbreaking institutional exhibitions, including All the World’s Future’s, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015 curated by the late Okwui Enwezor.
The impetus for Frequencies came in part from Murillo’s very own history as a displaced migrant in the mid 90s from his native Colombia. He sought to use the school desk as an intimate yet universal recording device tapping into a wide range of cultural differences via the release found in drawing and mark-making. Identifying with the porosity of the young human mind, Murillo approached the project as a collaboration between himself and the many participants, and in the Disrupted Frequencies paintings has repurposed canvases from the archive, intervening atop with his own gestures and markings.
Stitching together pieces of canvas – a technique characteristic of Murillo’s practice – the artist has worked directly onto a patchworked surface with oil bars and watercolors in varying shades of blue. The works recall Murillo’s Surge series, which also features dense fields of blue in wave-like formations, flooding the paintings’ planes with an effect that Murillo has likened to the force of ‘obliteration’ of water.
These recent works, as their title suggests, are an intentional disruption of the intellectual project of an archive. Pulling canvases from different regions together, Murillo consciously engages with the complexities of and creates friction within archival practices. The installation’s title contains the names of the countries its component canvases originate from, deliberately creating tension through the splicing together of objects from different geographical, social and cultural contexts. Further intensity is added through the intervention of the blue painted planes, which for Murillo acts to both erase, and to reveal. Recalling both the ocean and the air, they come to question that which binds geographical space, imagining new carved territories.
Viewed en masse, the canvases convey the conscious and unconscious energy of young minds. Often contributed to by several students, the canvases are densely layered with drawings, slogans, messages and motifs. The canvases feature universally recognised words and images alongside culturally specific expressions – the result of a project that is both a local and global endeavour.
India, China, Egypt, United States, Morocco, Philippines, Germany, United Kingdom), 2013-2023,
Oil, oil stick, watercolour, ballpoint pen, fountain pen, graphite, felt tip pen, highlighter pen,
permanent marker, paint, crayon, staples, natural pigments, debris, and other mixed media on canvas in
six parts © Oscar Murillo, courtesy the artist. Photo by Tim Bowditch & Reinis Lismanis.
Imagining, questioning, disrupting; in Murillo’s Disrupted Frequencies as well as his decade-long archive, the possibilities of collectivity are manifest not only conceptually but are quite literally embedded within its fabric. Pursuing these possibilities is crucial at this moment in time of political and socio-geographical upheaval.
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