In March 2020 when COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, Murillo returned to his hometown of La Paila (Colombia). Over the following months, he worked to produce a new body of paintings that allude to growing political unrest, both in the local context of Colombia and throughout the world.
David Zwirner is pleased to present News, an exhibition of these new paintings, on view at the gallery’s Paris location. The heightened formal and visual intensity of these paintings represents a point of departure in Murillo’s art that speaks to the anxieties and conditions of the present moment with newfound urgency. These works are among the largest and most elaborate in the artist’s ongoing manifestation series. Characterized by dense and almost aggressive bursts of color, including broad swaths of vivid cerulean blue and fiery red, these large-scale paintings are created in a manner which the artist has described as a physical release or discharge of energy from the body.
