Oscar Murillo

Oscar Murillo believes that art is born out of trauma, and that solace can be found through creation. He began doodling after moving from Colombia to London as a preteen. Far from the home he’d known, he dove headfirst into art. Decades on and with a Turner Prize—one of the art world’s most prestigious honors—under his belt, among other accolades, the artist still incorporates glimmers of those early years in his style, defined in part by abstract patchworks of color and bold, frenetic lines. These days, he’s in Venice working on his new exhibition titled “A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise,” which will put on display a number of his new paintings, in addition to a presentation of Frequencies—a project he started where he sent blank canvases to over 300 schools around the world and allowed students to fill them up with marks, scribbles, or words. His collection of the canvases—decorated by kids from Brazil, Japan, and South ­Africa, among many other countries—now numbers in the tens of thousands.

Write to Moises Mendez II at moises.mendez@time.com.