For any budding artist who has dreamed of having a painting on display in Tate Modern... your time is now, and it’s all thanks to Turner Prize-winning artist Oscar Murillo.
His new project, called The flooded garden (the title is styled in lower case), is taking over the gallery’s iconic Turbine Hall and it’s a work that allows Londoners (and more) to show their artistic side.
The flooded garden consists of huge canvases mounted on scaffolding and encourages visitors of all ages to pick up a paintbrush and make their mark. “It’s about unbound freedom and unbound connection to just letting go,” the artist says.
It opened this weekend and already people are flocking in, prompting one critic to call the work irresistible. “Paint is energy, it is life,” they enthused.
Murillo is known for his inventive works that run from paintings to sculptures, installations to live events. He regularly explores issues around the collective, social bonds and cultural exchanges.
We meet on the terrace of Tate Modern’s fifth floor, taking advantage of the first sunny day in what feels like forever. It happens to be the opening of parliament and helicopters circle overhead as we chat.
Murillo is as cool as it gets, dressed all in black, with multiple earrings, short beard and a black cap with ‘Forgotten Fantasy’ emblazoned on it in yellow. He is laid back and great company, always willing to interrogate each question from different angles – an hour flies by.
I ask what it means for an artist to have work in the Turbine Hall, following so many iconic pieces: from Carsten Holler’s helter skelter slides, to Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. “It’s a tremendous honour,” he says. “And growing up in London, Tate was the home institution. It’s the pinnacle, it doesn’t get better than that as an artist, it’s a huge accolade.”
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 around the world because of its beautiful green spaces – parks and gardens.”
For this work, the main inspiration was Claude Monet and his garden at Giverny, which inspired Water Lillies and so many other of the great impressionist’s paintings.
“My lightbulb moment was when I realised he had cataracts when he was working on the paintings,” Murillo says. “So however cute the paintings, he was in a moment of agony and antagonism with himself. I used that as an entry point for my own problems as an artist.”
He created an idea of a man isolated in a beautiful space, and suffering. “Out of that antagonistic state, he was radically making work that is now loved and celebrated by the world.”
And in this project, though it’s ostensibly fun and participatory – it’s under the heading Uniqlo Tate Play, and he wants people to have a good time – he points to the dark side of individuals painting over other people’s work. “There’s this flooding. They will eradicate what’s already there. There’s a kind of violence, which I call ‘social cataracts’, there’s a collective eradication when you encounter something but you ignore it.
“It’s how we’ve been since the Eighties; we’ve been forced by the systematic rearrangement of civilisations not to care so much about each other. We’ve been funnelled through a system that is about the individual.”
The flooded garden is not the first time Murillo has collaborated with the public – he did it for a decade with schoolchildren from around the world in a project called Frequencies, stapling canvases to desks and seeing what they’d draw on them.
“I first did it in Colombia and it drove me on to continue – it went on for 10 years. Seeing kids do something without doctrine is beautiful. You begin to see the indoctrination of society in how kids changed as they got older. It shows you how we condition ourselves. How we calcify and become more rigid.”
Murillo moved to London with his family from La Paila, a small village in the west of Colombia, in 1996 when he was 10. His father was a trade unionist and had been forced to flee the country. “There was a substantial number of us who came to London.”
The move was tough but he found consolation in art. “London is such a rich city, but when not even the language isn’t your own, you’re so displaced you feel in a barren place. Drawing began to console and give me reconciliation.”
He adds, “Drawing and painting were things I loved, and used as therapy. I had been completely removed from my own cultural soil, what connects us to a place, of friends and culture in general. That had been eradicated.”
After throwing himself into art and leaving school, he received 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 in a New York auction one of his paintings sold for 10 times more than expected.
“My gallery sent me a text. I saw £50,000 but instead, it was £500,000. When the reality dawned on me I drank some whiskey. Not in celebration, but in the understanding that this is f**ked up. I thought, ‘We’re going to have to buckle up now as we’re going to go through turbulence.’ And that’s what it was for four years; it was rough. The noise becomes so loud it’s 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 has struggled with. “New York and London are very different. New York celebrates the idea of sensation. Basquiat was sensational. The work is tremendous. But I’ve never got deep into it. One thing that’s different is I’m working class and he’s middle class. What drove his work was the deep harrowing racial tension that still haunts the American landscape. Mine is much more universal. There are antagonistic frictions I discuss but he was a shooting star – he left a message and went. I’ve been able to survive that early complication.”
Fortunately, as he navigated early success he had shelter from the storm. “The family and community here was always key to protecting me. Since we came here they were like a shield. The same kind of shield for when, years later, things started getting out of control 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 made headlines again as one of four artists on the shortlist for the Turner Prize who wrote to the organisers saying they wanted to be awarded one of the art world’s most prestigious prizes jointly – once again speaking to his interest in the collective.
“There was deep respect between us, and we trusted that was the thing to do,” he says now. “Five years on I see that as a beautiful gesture that went against the nature of the Turner Prize. That was a moment to show the collective.”
He has shown his commitment to the collective spirit in other ways, too, and has never been 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 working with the staff, and at a party to celebrate the end of the residency, he delivered an excoriating speech about the workers’ treatment. “That was 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 get into the mansion. Inside, the only reference point you have are the maids and the servants. There is no sense of humanity and that becomes the work. The exercise was responding to the reality. I would have been an imposter to push that to one side and set up a studio.” What was the response? “I nearly got lynched,” he says with a half smile.
It was solidarity that also prompted him to flush his British passport down an airplane toilet in 2016. “That was a gesture towards a position of privilege that I know I have and a lot of my friends don’t. When you have a Western passport, or passports from certain places, you’re privileged. With others you’re doomed and I see it still. If you had the freedom to move around…” As he tails off, I ask if he still doesn’t have a British passport. “No. It’s kind of a burden, I need a visa. When I come here.”
Murillo moved back to Colombia during the pandemic, first for a show in Bogota and back to the village of his birth. “The pandemic was key. I had been thinking about spending more time there but the pandemic accelerated all of that.”
Though 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 their mum). “Family keeps me connected to London, but also not belonging to London,” he says. “I participate but I’m detached, I’m an observer and it’s a privileged position.”
