February 2025

MARCO presents the first museum exhibition in Mexico dedicated to the work of artist Oscar Murillo. The exhibition produced by MARCO will run from Friday, March 14th to Sunday, August 10th, 2025.

In Spirits in the Swamp, Oscar Murillo articulates his commitment to social participation. The artist revisits the idea of the swamp, a biological site undervalued from the context of the aesthetics of development, to show us the richness we can find in its density and the transfers that take place between the human and non-human elements that traverse it, namely, the spirits.

After obtaining his Master’s from the Royal College of Art, Oscar Murillo had his first solo exhibition, Arepas y Tamales (2011), at Cole Contemporary gallery in London. During the show, the artist spent time preparing typical Colombian dishes and fostering social interaction with visitors to the space. This kind of interaction reflects Murillo’s long standing belief that art holds a significant social and political component, creating a space for community engagement, collective action, as well as moments of encounter and coexistence.

His work explores the intersection of class, migration, and labor, transcending the conventional limits of the pictorial act by inserting itself into dynamics of group interaction. His practice is part of a genealogy of artists who destabilize traditional hierarchies in art, turning canvas, gesture, and installation into surfaces for social inscription.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Murillo transforms the galleries into an active space, not merely a neutral container but a stage for performativity. The canvases unfold throughout the rooms, accumulating strokes and words as time passes, while long strips of dark fabric—once part of Murillo’s studio floor—hang like remnants of a sedimentation process. A monumental structure, plastic chairs, and rock-like sculptures made from corn evoke spaces of informal sociability, subverting the conventions of exhibition architecture; the presence of these elements serves as a tool for crossing references to complex cultural identities and placing them in tension.

The cross-contamination of materials, words, and social strata becomes evident in his paintings, where they operate as displaced signs within the language of art. His strategy of appropriation and re-signification challenges the notion of painting as an autonomous object, evoking the neoconcrete approach of the 1960s. Murillo positions painting as a field of symbolic negotiation, where economies of production and exclusion converge, transforming it into a space of experience and interaction.

Far from being static, Spirits in the Swamp activates a process of accumulation and erasure similar to the logic of the palimpsest, where the new overlays without completely erasing the old. Just as in his previous projects, Murillo does not present the social as mere representation but as a structuring force that reconfigures aesthetic experience; in this way, the exhibition raises critical questions about visibility, precarity, and how art operates as a field of friction between history, matter, and collectivity.