Ideas of permeability, participation, and collective exchange shape “Collective Osmosis,” a new exhibition by Oscar Murillo at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam, on view from March 14 through August 9, 2026. Bringing together participatory installations, an AI-generated video work, and selections from Murillo’s ongoing Frequencies project. The exhibition examines how images, gestures, and marks circulate across communities and geographies. At its center is Oscar Murillo’s long-standing interest in participation, inviting audiences to engage with works that evolve through shared experience rather than remaining fixed objects.
The exhibition also introduces a dialogue with the work of Claude Monet, whose paintings appear alongside Murillo’s installations through a collaboration between DAS MINSK and the nearby Museum Barberini. Oscar Murillo draws particular inspiration from Monet’s late works produced while the Impressionist struggled with cataracts. Altered vision does not read as a biographical detail but as an allegory for the blind spots that shape contemporary perception. Ahead of the opening, Whitewall spoke with Oscar Murillo about the metaphor of osmosis, the influence of Monet on his practice, and how technology and collective participation continue to shape his work.
Oscar Murillo on Monet and the Limits of Vision
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 by Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis.
WHITEWALL: The title Collective Osmosis suggests permeability and movement across membranes. What, for you, are the membranes that most urgently need to be crossed today between people, institutions, or ways of seeing?
OSCAR MURILLO: Membranes might be about how otherness has become an instrument to generate fear: the fear of the other.
Membranes might also be about accessibility. My Turbine Hall commission at the Tate Modern in 2024 – The flooded garden – was a success because institutions in the UK have free entry. This is one of the most radical cultural policies of my generation, one that I think has been underestimated.
This porous membrane between the institution and the streets means that young people of all ages have free access to culture and to their own potential.
But we have to get rid of the algorithm. This is perhaps one of the biggest challenges: stopping this solidifying barrier from forming around us.
“[Monet] was an artist that I connected with when thinking about our human capacity for radical freedom.”
-Oscar Murillo.
WW: Your exhibition begins with Monet’s cataracts and the transformation of his vision. How did this physical condition become a conceptual tool for thinking about society’s blind spots and the politics of visibility?
OM: I want to speak about my black paintings here, The Institute of Reconciliation. This is an ongoing body of work that I started in 2014. In 2015, it was shown as part of the 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures, curated by my late friend Okwui Enwezor. I installed 26 monumental black flags on the facade of the international pavilion.
I invited members of my family and my friends to work with me to produce the works in my studio. The energy was electric. My auntie made tamales for us all, sometimes she would cook lechona or Colombian sancocho. The sense of togetherness and collectivity brought memories of growing up in London as a migrant. The works then became about how to carry and nurture this sense of being together. We then took this energy to Anyang in South Korea, where my friend, Eungie Joo was curating the 5th Anyang Public Art Project in 2016.
In 2017 we then traveled to Birzeit, West Bank where my friend, Reem Fadda had invited me to participate in the inaugural show of the Palestinian Museum, Jerusalem Lives. I produced the canvases onsite with members of the local community there.
Monet has been a hero of mine since childhood. He was an artist that I connected with when thinking about our human capacity for radical freedom. As an adult, as the weight of the world came into my consciousness, I lost access to Monet. Years later when I learnt about his struggle with cataracts – his work returned to my life, this time through ideas of darkness and biological illness.
The black canvases and their darkness are a reflection of this struggle. A reflection of the many people, places and collectivity that experience darkness. Monet and his work serve as a monumental vessel through which to explore these ideas.
WW: Rather than positioning Monet as a historical monument, you describe him almost as an accomplice. What kind of partnership across time are you proposing between Impressionism and your own language of abstraction?
OM: Monet is a championed monument and a hero to the masses and I am claiming him as an accomplice in these dark times. There has always been darkness in humanity.
Although I admire the work produced in Europe, as witnesses of war and the perils of the 20th Century, impressionism, abstraction or academic formalities are irrelevant here…
Participation and the Question of Authorship
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 by Tim Bowditch
WW: Darkness appears in the show as a speculative space. What can be imagined or perhaps repaired when clarity disappears?
OM: I hope my children can answer that question.
WW: The Frequenciesproject has now gathered marks from schoolchildren around the world for more than a decade. When you look at this expanding archive, what do you feel you are witnessing: a portrait of a generation, a collective unconscious, or something else?
OM: A blank canvas on a desk at a school is a recording device… These young humans are vessels, they allow us to witness a space of intimacy.
Oscar Murillo, “disrupted frequencies (United States, Japan, Colombia),” 2013–2025. Oil, oil stick, ballpoint pen, fountain pen, graphite, felt tip pen, highlighter pen, permanent marker, paint, crayon, staples, natural pigments, debris, and other mixed media on canvas, 180 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo by Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis.
WW: At DAS MINSK, visitors are not just viewers; they become participants. How do you negotiate authorship once a work carries so many hands?
OM: Why are we so fixated with liability and individuality… This is why it is important to take participation outside of the museum building and think of Germany as a whole. Throughout the run of the show, we are taking canvas and drawing materials to all 16 federal states as a gesture towards the idea of osmosis and imagining what the collective could be.
Alongside the 70,000 people that participated at the Tate Modern during The flooded garden, we also took performers and music to parks around the city. My contribution to the São Paulo Biennial Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice last year was also placed in a public space, Ibirapuera Park. These exercises are not about accountability or individuality as Nan Goldin said…
“My advice to young people is to put down their phones. That’s my advice. Don’t think that it’s okay to live in your phone. You have a lot more to say than Instagram – and a lot to experience in the real world and the most important thing is standing in front of another person and feeling empathy for them and that can’t be done on the phone. I hope young people will take some power also and go into the streets and fight for what they believe in. And good luck. I’m sorry for young people there are these existential disasters looming.“
The Possibility of Rebirth
Oscar Murillo, “(untitled) scarred spirits,” 2025. Oil, oil stick and graphite on canvas, 220 × 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo by Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis.
WW: Anna Schneider speaks about your practice as redefining social and economic cycles. How can painting still often tied to the market and to ideas of mastery operate differently within your exhibitions?
OM: The flooded garden had 70,000 visitors in the summer of 2024 who participated for free. It was the first time painting had ever been performed and exhibited in the turbine hall and in the tanks.
Your question slightly baffles me, I am not sure how mastery, the market and experimentation in the context of a painting practice collide. Perhaps there is a blind spot created by speculative concerns around the market – this has nothing to do with my artistic practice.
WW: The Institute of Reconciliation, with its field of black canvases, frames many of the works in Potsdam. What kind of reconciliation is possible there, and what remains unresolved by necessity?
OM: The black canvases are an environment, not a frame.
It is a tentative proposal. When I see the 3 Monet paintings – Grainstacks, Houses of Parliament and Water Lilies, I cannot help but think about the peril of the European countryside, its complete collapse and the history of the European political system that exit with it.
There is hope in darkness. I see these black paintings as a potential space for rebirth. Like nature, we are all born from darkness. We have to live in hope, it is in our human condition. For me, it is the seas that bring us hope despite the part humans have forced it to play in history.
“We have to live in hope, it is in our human condition.”
-Oscar Murillo.
WW: The AI-generated film Territorial Osmosis translates children’s drawings into a hybrid moving image. How do you see technology extending or complicating the human gesture that lies at the center of your work?
OM: These speculative films are guided by our social elasticity. They are about the leap between physical canvases that have a certain raw simplicity, an earthiness from schools in Zambia, Ghana or Brazil, for example, and canvases from schools in Tokyo where collaboration was difficult due to the fact that students there do not write anymore… There is something there to reflect on. Through the repurposing of these images, I am experimenting in the spirit of communication and redistribution. This is done in the knowledge that the youngest human who would have participated in Frequencies was around 11years of age – like my son.
As for my gesture – well that’s my gesture. 17 years ago I scribbled the word Tamales on a raw canvas. There is no complication there. As for an extension of, humanity has ancient Egypt and cave drawings and I was born in the 80s.
WW: Across the exhibition, from intimate marks to monumental triptychs like surge (social cataracts), scale constantly shifts. How do you decide when a thought requires immersion rather than proximity?
OM: I work with space and my emotions.
Oscar Murillo, “tamales (Drawings off the Wall),” 2012. Oil, oil stick, graphite and dirt on canvas, 170 × 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo by Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis.
Oscar Murillo, “A song to a tearful garden,” part of the 36th São Paulo Biennial, “Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice,” Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brazil, September 6, 2025–January 11, 2026. Courtesy of the artist © Oscar Murillo. Photo by Reinis Lismanis.
