Oliver Osborne

Tanya Leighton, Berlin, is pleased to present Botticelli, a solo exhibition presenting five new paintings by Oliver Osborne. The exhibition takes its name both from the artist Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445 to 1510) and from the game his name inspired. In the game Botticelli, one person or team thinks of a famous individual and reveals the initial letter of their name. Other players then ask yes or no questions to guess the identity, requiring a good knowledge of biographical details of famous people. The game takes its name from the principle that the chosen person must be at least as famous as Sandro Botticelli.

The five paintings in this exhibition draw from a variety of subjects as source material. Botticelli, 2023-24 (fig. 1), incorporates a composition from an earlier painting by Oliver Osborne, along with an angel from Sandro Botticelli’s The Virgin and Child with Singing Angels (Raczyński Tondo), c. 1480, which hangs in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. o. T. (Cello Recital), 2024 (fig. 2) takes as its subject an image from a cello recital at the Freie Interkulturelle Waldorfschule Berlin that took place in July 2023, as well as an image of a young boy taken in December 2023 near Kinross, Scotland. Untitled, 2024 (fig. 3), is a multifigure composition using four angels from Botticelli’s Raczyński Tondo (see fig. 1) as well as the same young boy that appears in o. T. (Cello Recital) (see fig. 2). Study for March, morning II, 2024 (fig. 4), began with a photograph on a Sunday morning in Berlin in March 2024. The final painting in the show, and the most recent, is Portrait of a Youth (after Filippino Lippi), 2024 (fig. 5), which the artist created after the Filippino Lippi (c. 1457 - in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The Lippi painting comes so close to Botticelli’s style that there has been considerable disagreement among scholars as to exactly which artist is responsible for it. While it has frequently been attributed to Botticelli, most recent scholarship agrees that it is the work of Filippino.

Oliver Osborne (born 1985 in Edinburgh, lives and works in Berlin) has held solo exhibitions at Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles and Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca in 2023; Tanya Leighton, Berlin, JVDW, Düsseldorf, and Union Pacific, London in 2022; The Bunker, Santa Monica and Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca in 2021; Braunsfelder, Cologne in 2020; Peles Empire, Berlin, Gió Marconi, Milan, and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn in 2019, among others. Past group exhibitions include JVDW, Düsseldorf and Francis Irv, New York in 2024; La Traverse, Marseille and Union Pacific, London in 2023; Pas une Orange, Barcelona; Pact, Paris in 2022; Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; Max Hetzler, Berlin; and the German Embassy, London.

His work has been the subject of catalogues published by Braunsfelder, Cologne, 2020; Bonner Kunstverein, 2018 and Mousse, 2016.