Artist Oscar Murillo works across painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video. His practice explores ideas of cultural exchange and the ways in which ideas, languages, and everyday items are displaced, circulated, and combined.
Murillo first gained attention in the art world with his paintings that featured loose, scratchy, expressive marks, patches of pure colour, and dust collected in the studio, scrawled with words such as ‘mango’, ‘maiz’ and ‘chorizo’.
This release marks Oscar Murillo’s first-ever limited edition print, based on his celebrated series, Drawings off the Wall (2010–2014). Combining gestural abstraction with fragments of language, the works draw on personal memory and everyday cultural references to explore how ordinary words can carry layered social and cultural meaning.
In 2013, the SLG hosted his first institutional show in the UK, titled: if i was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator. He presented the contents of his studio in our Main Gallery. Stitched canvases, drawings, sculptures and films, copper tables, and floor pieces made from masses of pulped biro drawings acted as physical remnants of distinct social situations.
In 2022, he also co-curated and shared work in a group exhibition at the SLG, The Show is Over. Curated in dialogue with curated by Gabi Ngcobo, Curatorial Director at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP), the group exhibition explored the various ways in which we relate to and grapple with notions of loss, threats to the environment, spirituality, labour and silenced histories.
To celebrate our close relationship, and to support the gallery’s work, Murillo is collaborating with LITO Editions and Sotheby’s on the print, Mango, 2026.
All proceeds from edition sales directly support the SLG’s exhibition, events and communities & learning programmes.