For any budding artist who dreams of having a painting exhibited at the Tate Modern… now is your time, thanks to Turner Prize winning artist Oscar Murillo.
His new project, called The flooded garden (the title is stylized in lower case), takes over the gallery’s iconic Turbine Hall and is a work that allows Londoners (and beyond) to show their artistic side.
The flood garden consists of giant canvases mounted on scaffolding and encourages visitors of all ages to pick up a paintbrush and make their mark. “Freedom without attachment and attachment without attachment is about letting go,” says the artist.
It opened this weekend and already people are coming in, prompting one critic to call the work irresistible. “Paint is energy, it’s life,” they enthused.
Murillo is known for his inventive work that runs from paintings to sculptures, from installations to live events. It regularly examines issues of association, social connections and cultural exchanges.
We meet on the terrace on the fifth floor of Tate Modern, enjoying the first sunny day in what feels like forever. It happens to be the opening of parliament and a helicopter circles overhead as we chat.
Murillo is as cool as it gets, dressed all in black, with multiple ear rings, a short beard and a black cap with ‘Forgotten Fantasy’ emblazoned on it in yellow. He is calm and great company, always willing to question every question from different angles – an hour flies.
I ask what it means for an artist to have a work in the Turbine Hall, following so many iconic pieces: from Carsten Holler’s skelter helter slides, to Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. “It’s a great honor,” he says. “Growing up in London, Tate was the home institution. It’s the highlight, it doesn’t get any better than as an artist, it’s a huge compliment.”
He continues, “It’s responding to the Turbine Hall, it’s responding to London as a city with its generous green spaces. London stands out from other cities in the world because of its beautiful green spaces – parks and gardens.”
The main inspiration for this work was Claude Monet and his garden at Giverny, which inspired Water Lillies and many other of the great impressionist’s paintings.
“My light bulb was when I realized he had cataracts when he was working on the pictures,” says Murillo. “As cute as the pictures were, he was in trouble and at odds with himself. I used that as an entry point to my own problems as an artist.”
He created the idea of a man isolated in a beautiful space, suffering. “From that oppositional state, he was doing radical work that is now loved and celebrated by the world.”
And in this project, while apparently fun and participatory – it’s titled Uniqlo Tate Play, and it wants people to have a good time – it focuses on the dark side of individuals painting over people’s work another. “There is this flood. They will destroy what is already there. There is a kind of violence, which I call ‘social cataracts’, there is a collective destruction when you come across something but you ignore it.
“That’s how we’ve been since the eighties; the systematic reorganization of civilizations has forced us to care less about each other. We have come together through a system that belongs to the individual.”
The flooded garden is not the first time Murillo has collaborated with the public – he has done it for ten years with school children around the world in a project called Frequencies, stapling canvases to desks and seeing what they draw on them .
“I did it first in Colombia and it inspired me to continue – it continued for 10 years. It is beautiful to see children doing something without instruction. You begin to see the indoctrination of society in how children changed as they got older. It shows you how we condition ourselves. How we lose and become tougher.”
Murillo moved to London with his family from La Paila, a small village in western Colombia, in 1996 when he was 10 years old. His father was a trade unionist and had to flee the country. “A lot of us came to London.”
The transition was hard but he found solace in art. “London is such a rich city, but when you don’t even speak the language, you are so displaced that you feel in a barren place. Drawing began to empathize and reconcile me.”
He says, “I loved drawing and painting and used them as therapy. I was completely removed from my own cultural soil, which connects us to place, friends and culture in general. That was put to an end.”
After devoting himself to art and leaving school, he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Westminster, and then a Masters from the Royal College of Art. As a struggling artist he worked as a teaching assistant and then as a cleaner in the Gherkin (“on the 28th floor”)
Then everything changed. His work was included in a show at the Museum of Modern Art in the US, and then at an auction in New York one of his paintings sold 10 times more than expected.
“My gallery sent me a text. I saw £50,000 but instead, it was £500,000. When reality hit me I drank whiskey. Not in celebration, but in the understanding that this is f**ked up. I thought, ‘We’re going to have to buckle down now as we go through the turmoil.’ And so it was for four years; it was rough. The noise becomes so loud that it is impossible to have a voice. You become a beacon but not of the light you want to shine.”
He was called the new Basquiat, a label he struggled with. “New York and London are very different. New York celebrates the idea of sensation. Basquiat was sensational. The work is amazing. But I never really got into it. One thing that is different is that I am working class and it is middle class. What inspired his work was the deep, lateral racial tension that still grips the American landscape. Mine is much more universal. There are opposing frictions that I discuss but he was a shooting star – he left a message and went. I was able to live with that early complication.”
Fortunately, as he headed for early success, he had shelter from the storm. “The family and the community here have always been key to protecting me. Since we came here they were like a shield. The same kind of shield for when, years later, things started to get out of hand in the commercial aspect of being an artist. They became an anchor. For me, it’s always been about sharing the success with them.”
In 2019, Murillo again made headlines as one of four artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize who wrote to the organizers saying they wanted to jointly present him with one of the most prestigious prizes in the art world – again at talk about his interest in the collective.
“There was a lot of respect between us, and we trusted that it had to be done,” he says now. “Five years later I see that as a beautiful gesture that went against the nature of the Turner Prize. That was a moment to show the group.”
He showed his commitment to the collective spirit in other ways, too, and was never afraid to speak out. In 2015, a wealthy collector from Rio de Janeiro offered him an art residency in his mansion. Instead of spending the month painting, he went undercover to work with the staff, and at a party to celebrate the end of the residency, he gave an inspiring speech about the treatment of the workers. “That’s my artistic response. You respond to different things in different ways,” he says.
“In Rio, when you get invited to residencies, you have to go through an airport checkpoint to enter the mansion. Inside, your only point of reference is the maids and servants. There is no sense of humanity and that is the work. The exercise was responding to reality. I would be in a position to push that to one side and set up a studio.” What was the answer? “I was almost lynched,” he says with a half smile.
Solidarity also inspired him to flush his British passport down a plane toilet in 2016. “That was a gesture towards a privilege that I know I have and many of my friends don’t. When you have a passport from the West, or passports from certain places, you are privileged. With others you are doomed and I still see it. If you had the freedom to move around…” As he trails off, I ask him if he still doesn’t have a British passport. “It’s not. It’s kind of a burden, I need a visa. When I came here.”
Murillo moved back to Colombia during the pandemic, first for a show in Bogota and back to the village where he was born. “The pandemic was critical. I was thinking about spending more time there but the pandemic accelerated all that.”
Although he still comes back to London a lot. He has a studio here and two children at school in the capital (he is no longer with his mum). “Family keeps me connected to London, but also not London,” he says. “I participate but I’m detached, I’m an observer and it’s a privileged position.”
Uniqlo Tate Play: Oscar Murillo, The garden is under water at Tate Modern until August 26; tate.org.uk