Oscar Murillo and Jannis Kounellis @ Tate Modern

Oscar Murillo, The Flooded Garden, 2024

There is a richness of treasures on exhibition at Tate Modern at the moment, such that it's easy to spend a day wandering and waxing lyrical. I was particularly charmed by the Oscar Murillo installation in the Turbine Hall because it is another exhibition inviting participation. Murillo has hung canvases on makeshift walls inside the Hall, inviting visitors to leave their own expressive marks in a colour palette determined by Murillo. The whole work is supposedly inspired by Monet in his garden, and there is definite resemblance. The colourful, flowing lines in blues, pinks with touches of yellow and green are fresh and vibrant summery images. There are indications of water moving softly in the light and a sense of immersion in light, airy days at Giverny. The line to enter the section of canvas in the process of being painted was long, and I was happy to leave it to children. Because, even more compelling was Murillo's Surge series in an adjacent room. 

Oscar Murillo, The Flooded Garden, 2024

Colourful paintings on paper are attached to plastic white chairs, reminding us of the mutli-functions of art. The plethora of paintings come together in a darkened space to form a community, as though chatting in a square over aperitivo in Murillo's native Columbia. Alternatively, the community of paintings are protesting, reminding us of the placards carried in protests. Around the edges of the space, huge canvases hang as though encircling the protest placards, protecting them from the anti-protesters. The same vibrantly coloured loose brushstrokes cover the canvases, expressing the continual movement of the sea, and those who ride its waves. Still swayed by the inspiration of Claude Monet's late abstractions, Murillo was concerned to explore the darkness and blindness experienced by Monet in his later years. For Murillo, blindness and blurriness is a social condition. The installation itself successfully illustrated blindness, while the works themselves shone their vibrant light throughout the darkened space. The paintings were joyous and light-filled, while the sense of impending danger was carried by the low lighting and the clustering of the placards on chairs, huddling together inside the circle. But that, of course, is just as Monet would have seen it.

Jannis Kounellis, Bells, 1993

Upstairs in the Artist Room, the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis enjoyed rooms of his own. The darkness and threat of his pieces was of a completely different nature from that in Murillo's ocean gardens. But Kounellis's works were among the most compelling on display in the museum. Kounellis is another of those artists who works in steel to make it do things that we don't expect. In the sculptures and installations at Tate Modern, there is something extremely foreboding in his use of steel with other materials that don't go together. Manufactured steel and natural materials such as wood and cotton fabrics are bound together to create impossible and uncomfortable structures. Simultaneously, steel is made beautiful in its interaction with other materials and through display. 

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2005

In one, terrifying work, railway sleepers in the shape of a V, entrap an expressive splash of black paint. The containment of steel speaks to a kind of violence and terror that is everywhere present in Kounellis's work. Knives, meathooks, scissors and other dangers abound in these very powerful sculptures. In one of the most convincing, a rainbow of glass rocks hang like a curtain, framed again by steel girders. The curtain sits next to a rolled steel coal store, spilling with coal. Hanging above the pile of coal is an unlit paraffin lamp. The multi-colored glass rocks are beautiful, the pile of coal and extinguished lamp reminding us of the danger down below. The installation is supposed to have a wall made of a coal behind the curtain of glass, an addition that would threaten the jagged glass rocks. This was not present in the work's display at Tate Modern, but it's easy to imagine how it would give a sense of the pressure weighing on the glass, the threat of mining literally pushing from all sides. With Kounellis, there is always a threat, always a violence just waiting to happen, or having just taken place.  

Jannis Kounellis, Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass, 1990-2005

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Jannis Kounellis, Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass, 1990-2005

All in all, it was a treat to see so many Kounellis sculptures in one place, opening the possibilities of using materials against themselves to show the contradictions and inconsistencies of the twentieth century. Fascinating.