Oscar Murillo: Seeing, Not Seeing, and the Politics of Exchange

At DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam, Oscar Murillo’s Collective Osmosis unfolds not as a static exhibition, but as an active system. Running through August 9, 2026, the project repositions the museum as a site of permeability, where painting, participation, and historical dialogue intersect in real time.

Murillo’s work has long been concerned with movement of people, of labour, of images, of meaning across borders. Here, that movement is given both conceptual and physical form. The exhibition takes its title from the scientific principle of osmosis, the process through which particles move across a membrane toward equilibrium. Murillo adopts this as a social and political metaphor, imagining the museum not as a sealed institution, but as a porous structure open to exchange between individuals, communities, and geographies.

Central to this project is a dialogue with Claude Monet. Presented in collaboration with Museum Barberini, Monet’s late works marked by the artist’s deteriorating eyesight become a critical entry point. For Murillo, Monet’s cataracts are not simply biographical detail, but a lens through which to consider perception itself. What we see, what we fail to see, and what remains obscured by cultural, political, or historical conditions.

Darkness, in this context, is not absence but possibility. It becomes a speculative space, allowing Murillo to reframe Impressionism not as a study of light alone, but as an unstable field shaped by limitation, distortion, and interpretation.

This tension is amplified through Murillo’s own works, particularly those from the Frequencies and Disrupted Frequencies series. Since 2013, the Frequencies project has invited schoolchildren across the world to draw on canvases attached to their desks, producing an evolving archive of marks that reflect a global visual language in formation. These gestures, often spontaneous and unfiltered, stand in contrast to the canonised history of painting, yet are positioned here as equally significant.

The exhibition extends this logic through participatory processes. Murillo’s Social Mapping and Collective Painting projects invite visitors to contribute directly to large-scale canvases, collapsing the distinction between artist and audience. Painting becomes not a finished object but an ongoing action, shaped by multiple hands, contexts, and temporalities.

Within the architecture of DAS MINSK, this accumulation of marks, gestures, and traces creates an environment that is both visual and social. Murillo’s installation The Institute of Reconciliation surrounds Monet’s works with black canvases, situating them within a contemporary framework defined by political tension, ecological crisis, and global interdependence.

The exhibition also extends beyond the museum itself. Participatory canvases are developed across Germany and brought into the space over time, while outdoor painting events activate the museum’s terrace. This continuous movement ensures that the exhibition remains open-ended, evolving with each contribution.

At the Museum Barberini, Murillo’s large-scale triptych surge (social cataracts) further deepens this dialogue, juxtaposing abstraction with Monet’s serial studies of landscape. Together, the works question how vision is constructed, rehearsed, and ultimately understood within painting.

What emerges from Collective Osmosis is a redefinition of authorship and community. Murillo does not position himself as sole creator, but as facilitator of a broader process. Painting becomes a shared language, one that transcends geography while remaining grounded in individual experience.

In a cultural moment marked by division and accelerated consumption, Murillo proposes a different model. One based on accumulation rather than isolation, participation rather than observation, and exchange rather than ownership.

At DAS MINSK, the museum is no longer a container for art. It becomes a membrane.