January 21, 2026 (Potsdam, Germany) – Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo will activate the interior and exterior spaces at DAS MINSK, transforming the museum into a lively experiment of exchange and community from March 14 - August 9, 2026. The exhibition Collective Osmosis is a multi-layered meditation on visibility, landscape, and the political implications of artistic work across borders. The project marks the first collaboration between DAS MINSK and Museum Barberini, with works by the artist on view at both institutions.
In the project Collective Osmosis, Murillo creates a dialogue between his abstract paintings, visitors, and Impressionist works by Claude Monet. The starting point is Murillo’s engagement with the French painter’s life, work, and reception. In his later years, Monet suffered from cataracts, gradually losing his eyesight until undergoing surgery, which led to changes in his paintings’ composition and coloration. Murillo considers the artist’s shift in perception as both an allegory for the blind spots in our society and a catalyst for imagining new realities. Murillo thus explores the political dimensions of seeing and not-seeing, employing darkness as a speculative space for a new reading of Impressionism.
In science, the term osmosis, used in the exhibition’s title, describes how water particles move through a semi-permeable membrane, from a less concentrated solution to a more concentrated one, until equilibrium is reached. Murillo uses this concept as a metaphor to express his vision of equality and a universal human community. The principle of Collective Osmosis also stands for the opening of the museum, creating permeability and exchange between inside and outside, between museum and city, and between Potsdam and the world beyond.
Through its participatory dimension, Collective Osmosis brings to the fore each person’s inherent potential to create artistic gestures with brush, hand, or pen. Murillo sees art as a form of communication—the act of mark-making, for him and for participants in his collective painting actions, is an expression of freedom.
“Oscar Murillo succeeds in pushing forward the discourse about the medium of painting by interrogating both visible and invisible boundaries and redefining social and economic cycles,” says Anna Schneider, director of DAS MINSK. “His work explores new possibilities for community building. Collective Osmosis will become a lived experiment that fosters exchange and challenges inequality. Oscar Murillo’s decision to choose Claude Monet as an accomplice—an artist who translates light and landscape into works admired worldwide for their luminous colors—is an astute idea. In doing so, he expands his own frame of reference and moves closer to the idea of a universal human community.”
Oscar Murillo in Conversation with Claude Monet: The First Collaboration Between the Two Museums of the Hasso Plattner Foundation
Murillo has created a set of new paintings for the exhibition, on view at both DAS MINSK and Museum Barberini. At DAS MINSK, three of Monet’s iconic serial paintings from the Hasso Plattner Collection—the London Houses of Parliament, grainstacks, and the water lilies at Giverny—enter into dialogue with Murillo’s Frequencies series. New paintings from Murillo’s Disrupted Frequencies series will be accompanied by the AI-generated video work Territorial Osmosis, which combines drawings by schoolchildren from around the world into a hybrid moving-image work. These works are surrounded by an installation of black canvases, entitled The Institute of Reconciliation (ongoing since 2014), creating an environment that situates Monet’s historical paintings in the context of political, social, and ecological events in today’s globalized world.
A selection of canvases from the extensive Frequencies archive will also be exhibited. Initiated by Murillo in 2013, the Frequencies project invites school children from across the world to draw on canvases affixed to their desks over a period of several months. The resulting sketches on canvas document a global visual language of an emerging generation. Most recently, the project was carried out in six schools in Potsdam and Brandenburg in advance of the exhibition. The participating schools were: AWO Grundschule “Marie Juchacz” in Potsdam; Evangelisches Gymnasium Hermannswerder; Gesamtschule Am Schilfhof, Potsdam; School International, Potsdam; Städtisches Gymnasium Wittstock and Goethe-Schiller-Gymnasium, Jüterbog.
Mark-Making and Participation: Central Elements of the Exhibition at DAS MINSK
The ground floor at DAS MINSK focuses on Murillo’s painting processes, which consist of a multitude of gestural marks and fleeting traces. At the center of the display are new paintings from the series Scarred Spirits.
The presentation also features two participatory projects that Murillo has developed over the past few years in various locations: Social Mapping and Collective Painting. For the Social Mapping process, Murillo invites participants to draw on large-scale canvases. These canvases are then painted on by visitors in a second process of Collective Painting, which takes place in exhibition settings at different sites—including The flooded garden (2024) in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern or A song to a tearful garden (2025), recently initiated in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park for the 36th São Paulo Biennale. Canvases and documentary material resulting from these projects will be on view at DAS MINSK.
In the first weeks of the exhibition, painted canvases from the collective work A song to a tearful Garden will be on display on the terrace at DAS MINSK. From April 25, 2026, the participatory event will begin, with visitors invited to paint Social Mapping canvases in an open-air Collective Painting process.
On occasion of the exhibition, Murillo will launch a nationwide Social Mapping project across Germany, with the canvases produced in different parts of the country arriving at DAS MINSK throughout the run of the exhibition.
Oscar Murillo: A New Work at Museum Barberini
A new, large-scale triptych entitled surge (social cataracts) will be on view in the collection presentation of Impressionist painting at the Museum Barberini. This constellation of Murillo’s triptych and Monet’s serial works explores how the act of seeing is rehearsed and realized in painting, juxtaposing Monet’s figurative representation with Murillo’s abstraction.
Regarding his works from the series Surge, Oscar Murillo says: “For me, Monet and his paintings are a medium through which I can grasp paradox. On the one hand, his works are expressions of a universally recognized aesthetic—gesture, size, color, harmony, and joy. On the other hand, his experiences as a person and the bilateral cataracts he suffered allow me to imagine cosmic torment and darkness as a metaphor. The strong, structured paintings I am working on are a direct result of these reflections—reflections that seek refuge in pixels of nothingness or orbit around them.”
Image credits:
1. Oscar Murillo, (untitled) scarred spirits, 2025, oil, oil stick and graphite on canvas, 220 × 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo: Tim Bowditch & Reinis Lismanis
2. Oscar Murillo, Frequencies, 2013—ongoing, Ljubljana, Slovenia, ballpoint pen, fountain pen, graphite, felt tip pen, highlighter pen, permanent marker, paint, crayon, staples, natural pigments, debris and other mixed media on canvas, 55 × 141 cm. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo: Tim Bowditch
3. Oscar Murillo, A song to a tearful garden, part of the 36th São Paulo Biennial, Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice, September 6, 2025–January 11, 2026. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo: Reinis Lismanis
4. Oscar Murillo, surge (social cataracts), 2025, oil, oil stick, and spray paint on canvas, in three parts, overall 250 × 750 cm, installation view. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo: Tim Bowditch & Reinis Lismanis