Oscar Murillo: Exhibition at the MINSK, Intervention at the Museum Barberini

Through August 9, 2026, the Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo transforms the interior and exterior spaces of the MINSK into the site of an expansive experiment in exchange and collectivity. The exhibition Collective Osmosis simultaneously marks the inaugural collaboration between the two museums of the Hasso Plattner Foundation—the MINSK and the Museum Barberini. Murillo’s large-scale painting Surge is presented as an artistic intervention within the Barberini’s collection display. The series originates in words that Murillo sprays onto the blank canvas; he then lays the works horizontally on the floor and applies solid oil sticks in a range of colors, building up layer upon layer until a shimmering mass engulfs both surface and script like a rising flood.
At the MINSK, three iconic works from Claude Monet’s series—depicting the Houses of Parliament in London, the haystacks, and the water lilies at Giverny—from the Hasso Plattner Collection enter into dialogue with Murillo’s Frequencies series. At the Museum Barberini, a new large-scale triptych entitled surge (social cataracts) is presented within the collection display of Impressionist painting.

With this project, Murillo establishes a dynamic exchange between his abstract painting, the public, and the Impressionist works of Claude Monet. At its core lies his sustained engagement with the life, work, and reception of the French painter. In his later years, Monet suffered from cataracts, experiencing a gradual loss of vision prior to surgery—an impairment that profoundly altered both the compositional structure and chromatic register of his paintings. Murillo interprets this perceptual shift as emblematic of the blind spots within contemporary society, while also discerning in it the latent potential for the emergence of new realities.