Oscar Murillo

Oscar Murillo was born in 1986 in La Paila, a small town in Colombia's Valle del Cauca region. His family moved to London when he was ten, and he attended Cardinal Pole Catholic School in Hackney. He enrolled at the University of Westminster to study animation but switched to fine art after the department accepted his portfolio, earning a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 2007. He completed an MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London in 2012.

Murillo's work spans large, often unstretched raw canvas paintings worked on the floor of his studio, sewn and collaged from multiple painted fragments, alongside installation, performance, and works on paper. His long-running project Frequencies, begun in 2013, has collected drawings made by schoolchildren on canvases stretched over classroom desks in dozens of countries, a recurring example of the collaborative, socially engaged side of his practice.

His market rose sharply in 2011 to 2013, drawing significant press attention to his auction prices, and his profile grew alongside inclusion in the 56th Venice Biennale's All the World's Futures (2015), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), and a solo presentation at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017 to 2018). In 2019 he was awarded the Turner Prize jointly with the three other nominees, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Tai Shani, a joint award the judges made in solidarity given the political urgency of the shortlisted work that year. In 2023 the University of Westminster awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2024 to 2025 he presented The flooded garden, a major commission in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, alongside solo presentations at WIELS in Brussels and Fundacao de Serralves in Porto. Sources describe him dividing his time between London and La Paila, Colombia.

Early critical writing on Murillo, in the wake of his rapid 2011 to 2013 auction rise, tended to frame him as a case study in art-market speculation, a young painter whose prices seemed to have outpaced his exhibition history. That framing shifted over the following decade as museums and biennials absorbed his work into broader conversations about migration, labor, and globalization, culminating in the 2019 Turner Prize and, in 2024, a Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission and concurrent solo presentations at WIELS and Serralves. The critical throughline across both periods is an interest in Murillo's materials and process, canvases worked on the floor, stitched from multiple fragments, and extended through community projects like Frequencies, as a way of registering displacement and collective labor rather than treating painting purely as a formal exercise.

Murillo's auction record is Untitled (Drawings Off the Wall), which sold for USD 401,000 at Phillips New York in September 2013, a price reached during the intense speculative interest that surrounded his work that year. As of mid-2026, that 2013 result remains his auction high; subsequent sales have not surpassed it, and market commentary has noted that his prices cooled significantly after the initial boom. He is represented across several major galleries internationally, including David Zwirner, kurimanzutto, Taka Ishii Gallery, and Carlos/Ishikawa, and his work is held in institutional collections including Tate, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Murillo has no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and gallery documentation carry extra weight when evaluating a work. His auction record has stood since 2013 even as his institutional profile has continued to grow, a divergence worth noting: strong museum and biennial support has not, so far, translated into a new secondary-market high. Collectors should also be aware that published sources give slightly different accounts of where he is currently based, so any claim about his primary studio location should be treated as approximate rather than fixed.