OSCAR MURILLO: A. TELEGRAM TO MY DEAR SUKI
Gagosian is pleased to announce A Telegram to my dear Suki, an exhibition of drawings, paintings, and a video work by Oscar Murillo.
June 20–August 30, 2025
Athens
A Telegram to my dear Suki builds on a sequence of recent exhibitions by Murillo including The flooded garden at Tate Modern, London (2024), and Espíritus en el Pantano, which is on view at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, until August 10, 2025. These projects transformed their institutional venues into sites of collective expression by inviting visitors to inscribe and layer their own gestures onto canvas installed throughout each space. Through this act of participation, the museum becomes a social arena, visibly underscoring the possibilities and challenges of collectivity, communion, and shared culture.
In A Telegram to my dear Suki, Murillo meditates on the potential and fragility of communicative mark making. A single gesture on a surface activates it, charging it with energy that may be echoed, erased, or expanded upon by another. These ideas of diffusion, exchange, connection, and rupture take on a particular urgency in the current cultural and political climate. Included in the exhibition are examples of Murillo’s Flight drawings (2012–), works on paper produced by the artist while he is seated aboard an aircraft. Defined by their economy of materials, the results take shape on small sheets of paper, or on larger pieces that have been folded and refolded. The tools—pen, pencil, and carbon paper—are minimal, and Murillo works on both sides of each sheet, building up densely layered compositions in which words and markings obscure each other. The drawings are intimate yet unselfconscious; inspired by automatism, they allow gesture to operate as a form of liberated communication.
Finally, a selection of surge (social cataracts) paintings (2018–) lays bare the breakdown of communication. These works feature dense fields of blue oil stick, applied to canvas in wavelike formations that flood the visual plane. The effect is one of painterly inundation that Murillo has related to water’s capacity to obliterate, to erase all in its path.