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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

For some years now, Oscar Murillo has been making work in aeroplanes Out of necessity as much as desire, the Colombia-born artist now calls many places home He has recently shown in New York, Shanghai, Cambridge, Baku, Venice, Ramallah, Gwangju, and Sydney – a non-exhaustive list The critic Viktor Wang has dubbed Murillo’s ‘expanded practice’, which utilises these ad-hoc studio spaces, ‘flight mode’   How to describe Murillo’s work in 2020? He is so prolific that I saw three discrete, overlapping shows of his works within a single summer The artist, who exploded into the art world in 2013, is in a fecund phase Though Murillo was initially synonymous with loud and expressionistic oil pantings, his work today spans mediums — video, drawing, installation, sculpture — and is united more by its themes than by any unified aesthetic   I first met Murillo at the top of David Zwirner gallery in London on a Monday morning in June 2019 He had just started installing his show, Manifestation (2019), that would open that Friday evening He refused coffee, professing that he was pumped on the adrenaline We sat on couches in front of a Luc Tuymans painting – Three Percent (2017), a ghostly bluish close-up of a face in profile – that he would reference several times Later, as we walked out, he gave brisk instructions to the crew who were installing his paintings and constructing a pavilion for an opening night performance In the fall, we spoke again — I in New York, he in Colorado — a week before he became one of the joint winners of the 2019 Turner Prize We spoke one last time in April during the COVID-19 pandemic, while we were both hunkered down for the foreseeable future in New York and Colombia, and revisited some of the newly unstable assumptions of our previous interviews and of the art world at large   Murillo is thirty-four, still young for practically a household name He graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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fiction

June 2013

The Cherry Tree

Sheila Heti

fiction

June 2013

That winter, all the plums froze. All the peaches froze and all the cherries froze, and everything froze so...

fiction

May 2016

See Inside for Holiday Special

Joanna Quinn

fiction

May 2016

We are not tourists. We are journalists. We fly out from Heathrow, Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle to foreign airports...

Art

August 2016

False shadows

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by...

 

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