MIHAI OLOS

For some of his exhibition openings, Mihai Olos invited guests to connect their fingers in a structure suggesting a knot, thus forming a human chain through the gallery space. He also performed this gesture spontaneously with friends, and notably with Joseph Beuys at documenta 6 in 1977, when Olos drew the symbol on a blackboard—later integrated by Beuys into Das Kapital Raum. The knot appears throughout Olos’s work in countless variations: from the geometrical precision of the 1970s paintings to the looser modules of his late large-scale canvases. It emerges in sketches, dreamlike watercolours, erotic paintings of intertwined bodies, as well as in sculpture, ceramics, small objects, land art, digital studies, and performative projects. Rooted in archaic spindles and the glue-free wooden joints of buildings from his native Maramureș, the knot bridges art and science in a personal way. It resonates with ideas of modular knowledge proposed by quantum physicist Philip Morrison, while also referencing Japanese architecture and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. For Olos, the module’s social potential lay at the heart of Olospolis or The Universal City—a utopian vision of communities “knotted” together in mutual support. His idea also extends into language: in Romanian, rost signifies both a physical joint and a sense of meaning, while rostire means utterance. This linguistic layer reinforces the knot as the core of a diverse body of work marked by lifelong experimentation and playful engagement.