Park Nights: Oscar Murillo's The Cleaners' Late Summer Party with COMME des GARÇONS
Artist Oscar Murillo presented a new performance specially commissioned for the Serpentine Gallery’s acclaimed Park Nights series.
Taking place in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012 designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, Murillo’s new work highlighted and subtly subverted the social atmosphere of the Pavilion and its surrounding landscape. Audience members were spectators of and participants in this site-specific celebration that explored themes of identity and language as well as cultural and social inclusion.
Mixing personal references of Latin American conviviality with visual and social patterns of globalised society, Murillo’s performances generate tension where individual and cultural identities, including language, are questioned.
Exploring contemporary lifestyle clichés in the context of his performances, Murillo’s practice develops a form of site-specificity where the site becomes the heart of the piece. His work reveals a political approach to issues of class, wealth, economy and power expressed through materials and processes.
Murillo’s performances, paintings, videos and installations utilise opposites to explore commonality. Using vocabulary from everyday advertising in his canvases, he explores the functionality of displaced and reconfigured words, recalling a 1960s Neo-Concrete approach to language.
VIERNES SOCIAL, an artist book by Murillo, was published by onestar press with the Serpentine Gallery on the occasion of The Cleaners’ Late Summer Party with COMME des GARÇONS: onestarpress.com/VIERNES-SOCIAL
Born in 1986 in Colombia, Murillo graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2012. He lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions and performances include animals die from eating too much – bingo!, Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2011).
