Oscar Murillo’s Visceral New Works at David Zwirner Paris

David Zwirner Paris welcomes an extraordinary exhibition that stands as testament to the evolving vision of one of contemporary art’s most compelling voices. Oscar Murillo’s solo presentation, titled Unfinished thinking: Paintings and Social Maps, unfolds as a meditation on artistic process itself, revealing the generative labour that transforms raw materials into works of profound emotional resonance.

The manifestation paintings that form the nucleus of this exhibition represent a significant evolution in Murillo’s career long investigations into process and materiality. Beginning in 2018, these works demonstrate the artist’s increasingly sophisticated approach to the relationship between fragmentation and wholeness, between the discarded and the transcendent. Each painting is born from an intricate ritual of stitching, a deliberate weaving together of material fragments gathered throughout Murillo’s studio practice. These heterogeneous elements, stitched into a unified support, become the foundation for a cascading symphony of colour and form.

Upon this carefully constructed base, Murillo orchestrates vivid hues against passages of profound black, creating a visual and tactile experience that radiates almost corporeal turmoil. The interplay between luminosity and shadow, between the soft fluidity of colour and the jagged, almost violent incisions of dark pigment, generates a visceral energy that speaks to the human condition itself. There exists within each composition a palpable sense of struggle and transformation, a visual echo of the laborious processes through which it came into being.

The Architecture of Creation

What distinguishes these manifestation paintings is Murillo’s mastery of layering and concealment. Through the physical acts of stitching existing fragments into novel configurations, combining them with additional materials, and subsequently covering each surface with paint, the artist orchestrates a profound transfer of energy. This energy traverses the accumulated history and strata of his own studio practice, creating works that function simultaneously as intimate documents and universal statements.

The exhibition title itself, Unfinished thinking, gestures towards the perpetual state of becoming that characterises Murillo’s methodology. These paintings resist the notion of completion or finality; rather, they remain open, generative, alive with possibility. The social maps referenced in the exhibition’s subtitle introduce an additional dimension, suggesting that Murillo’s practice extends beyond pure abstraction into engagement with collective experience and shared spatial consciousness.

This body of work invites viewers into the intricate choreography of artistic creation, revealing how meaning emerges not through singular gestures but through the accumulation of intentional marks, materials and transformations.

Imagery courtesy of David Zwirner (@davidzwirner).