Kathy Murillo is a queer Venezuelan Caribbean-rooted and Dutch-born artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the politics of identity, belonging, and justice through intersectional feminist lens.
Working across painting, sculpture, video, performance, works on paper, and participatory projects, Murillo weaves personal mythology with collective narratives to examine how bodies move through social, cultural, and institutional structures.
Central to Murillo’s practice is an investigation of belonging as both an emotional landscape and a political condition. Her work reflects the layered experience of navigating multiple identities and addresses themes such as emotional awareness, memory, resilience, and the impact of structural power on the lived body.
In her sculpture Holandés-Venezolaans, for example, Murillo merges two cultural forms into a single suspended structure, using hybridity as a symbolic language to explore what it means to inhabit multiple worlds at once. Murillo sees no separation between life and practice. Her work functions as a space for dialogue, care, and critique, amplifying marginalized voices and inviting audiences to reimagine belonging through a lens of empathy, resistance, and collective strength.
Kathy Murillo working at studio, 2024