Oscar Murillo: Collective Osmosis

Oscar Murillo has transformed the interior and exterior spaces of DAS MINSK– Kunsthaus in Potsdam into a lived experiment of exchange and community, with visitors invited to paint on large-scale canvases in an open-air Collective painting process. In addition, works by Oscar Murillo and Claude Monet are on view at DAS MINSK and at Museum Barberini, marking the first collaborative exhibition project between the two institutions of the Hasso Plattner Foundation. A new podcast traces the connections between the French Impressionist and the Colombian-born, London-based artist.

In the exhibition Collective Osmosis, on view through August 9, 2026, Oscar Murillo creates a dialogue between his abstract paintings, his participative projects, 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. The exhibition explores the political dimensions of seeing and not-seeing, positing darkness as a speculative space for a new reading of Impressionism.

Mark-making and participation
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 metaphor to express his vision of equality and a universal human community, with the principle of Collective Osmosis also standing for the opening of the museum to create permeability and exchange between inside and outside, between museum and city, and between Potsdam and the world. 

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 are an expression of freedom. In this spirit, a large-scale canvas on the terrace of DAS MINSK invites visitors to leave their marks during the exhibition. These canvases are produced via a nationwide Social mapping project initiated by Oscar Murillo across Germany, for which collective drawing sessions are held in public spaces in different parts of the country. The finished canvases are sent back to DAS MINSK to be shown in the exhibition space. In advance of the exhibition, Murillo’s long-term project Frequencies took place in six schools in Potsdam, Jüterbog and Wittstock, adding to an ever-growing archive of the thoughts of schoolchildren worldwide, as recorded on canvases attached to their desks for six months. 

The new podcast “Perpetual Blue—From Claude Monet to Oscar Murillo”
The podcast Perpetual Blue maps Oscar Murillo’s practice and its connections to Claude Monet, as his abstract paintings share the walls with Monet's water lilies, grainstacks, and Houses of Parliament at DAS MINSK and Museum Barberini in Potsdam. Writer and editor Kate Brown traces the links across conversations with Murillo, DAS MINSK director and exhibition co-curator Anna Schneider, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and art historian Evie Hatch, asking what paintings, pigments, and marks carry with them—and what it means to make an institution porous.

Perpetual Blue is now available across all major podcast platforms. And at dasminsk.de.

The exhibition Collective Osmosis is curated by Anna Schneider and Daniel Milnes. An accompanying catalogue includes contributions by Daniel Milnes, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Richard Shiff, Ortrud Westheider, and a conversation between Oscar Murillo and Anna Schneider.