Oscar Murillo

Dearest Suki, thank you for your eternal laughter, warmth, and friendship—please read this telegram, upon my early morning landing let’s meet for Galbitang.
—Oscar Murillo, a dedication to Suki Seokyeong Kang (1977–2025)

Gagosian is pleased to announce A Telegram to my dear Suki, an exhibition of drawings, paintings, and a video work by Oscar Murillo, opening at the gallery in Athens on June 20, 2025.

A Telegram to my dear Suki builds on a sequence of recent exhibitions by Murillo including The flooded garden at Tate Modern, London (2024), and Espíritus en el Pantano, which is on view at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, until August 10, 2025. These projects transformed their institutional venues into sites of collective expression by inviting visitors to inscribe and layer their own gestures onto canvas installed throughout each space. Through this act of participation, the museum becomes a social arena, visibly underscoring the possibilities and challenges of collectivity, communion, and shared culture.

In A Telegram to my dear Suki, Murillo meditates on the potential and fragility of communicative mark making. A single gesture on a surface activates it, charging it with energy that may be echoed, erased, or expanded upon by another. These ideas of diffusion, exchange, connection, and rupture take on a particular urgency in the current cultural and political climate. Included in the exhibition are examples of Murillo’s Flight drawings (2012–), works on paper produced by the artist while he is seated aboard an aircraft. Defined by their economy of materials, the results take shape on small sheets of paper, or on larger pieces that have been folded and refolded. The tools—pen, pencil, and carbon paper—are minimal, and Murillo works on both sides of each sheet, building up densely layered compositions in which words and markings obscure each other. The drawings are intimate yet unselfconscious; inspired by automatism, they allow gesture to operate as a form of liberated communication.