Oscar Murillo is a committed artist, but in KM21 that social involvement feels empty ★★☆☆☆

It must be said: it is impressive that a relatively small museum such as KM21, with only one room available, will be hosting the first Dutch solo exhibition of international superstar Oscar Murillo (36).

Murillo, born in Colombia and partly raised in England, has been a favorite of international collectors for years. When he graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 2012, his abstract paintings brought in huge sums of money almost immediately. The popularity of many other ‘zombie formalists’, as Murillo and some contemporaries were called, ebbed after 2016. Murillo’s star has just continued to rise steadily. Not only is he doing well in the commercial art market, he is also a frequent guest at biennials and in 2019 he was one of the winners of the prestigious Turner Prize.

Why does he manage to continue making a career, and many other ‘zombies’ fail? Maybe because Murillo keeps reinventing himself. He not only makes abstract paintings that look good on the walls of millionaires, but also videos and large-scale installations that are often not for sale. At each exhibition it is a surprise which version of the artist you will find. For example, for his first major solo in New York in 2014, he made a replica of the chocolate factory in Colombia where his mother worked. In his work he has also been referring to social themes such as migration and the downside of globalization for years hot topics in the art world.

That social involvement can also feel empty is apparent in KM21. The focus here is on a series of new oil paintings, inspired by the French impressionist Claude Monet. Monet developed cataracts later in life, which prevented him from seeing colors and textures well. It was precisely during this period that he painted his famous water lilies. Murillo painted his own water lilies on pieces of roughly stitched canvas with the occasional hole or tear. No pastel colors for him, but harsh blues and reds. The paint is smeared on the canvas with great gestures.

These wild paintings are quite nice in their own right. There is something wrong with the meaning that the artist gives it. He calls the series ‘social cataracts’, drawing a parallel between Monet’s limited vision and the social blindness that ‘we’ in society would display for each other. The comparison is not only far-fetched, it also remains gratuitous. Nowhere in these paintings do you feel any of the problems that Murillo is apparently about.

Even less convincing is the installation Mesmerizing Beauty† Here the artist clearly refers to a social reality. He attached small paintings to wooden slats, making them look like protest signs, all facing each other. You could see a – rather predictably – commentary on polarization in it. It could also be a tea party. Because of the plastic garden chairs to which the protest signs are attached, and the fumbling frames around the paintings, the whole looks mostly confused.

Only at one moment in the exhibition do you feel the tension: in the video Collective Conscience, which could already be seen last year at art manifestation Sonsbeek in Arnhem. A long row of paper dolls lies here in a ditch between the sugar cane fields of Murillo’s native Colombia. Associations with groups of migrants moving to the US from Latin America are emerging. As party music swells, the explosives hidden inside the dolls suddenly go off. The procession goes up in flames. You miss the urgency of this video in the rest of the exhibition, which is made up of big words and unfulfilled promises.