Oliver Osborne

Tanya Leighton is pleased to present German Afternoons, an exhibition of new works by Oliver Osborne. Made over the last year, the exhibition presents works in oil, acrylic and machine-embroidered cotton. In this new body of work, Osborne employs elements of portraiture, still life, abstraction and text, with an emphasis – consistent throughout the artist’s career – on painting itself as the primary subject.

Flirting with anachronism and genre, the paintings attempt to assert their contemporary nature by visualising the blurred simultaneity that our network of smartphones engenders. Painting is both here and not here, now and also then. Most prominent in this body of work is the portrait of a minor 17th-century princess, Elisabeth of the Palatinate, daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen. Her image has become for the artist, like Robert Campin’s ‘Portrait of a Fat Man’ or the ongoing series of rubber plant paintings before them, an enigmatic, mutable motif that can be revisited and reworked to different ends.

German Afternoons takes its name from a 1986 album by the American singer-songwriter John Prine, who died from Covid-19 early in the pandemic. It is – like any exhibition – as much the upshot of deciding what not to do as it is the result of the positive decisions on what might be OK. The negative space of what has been omitted is imagined to help the viewer frame what has been allowed to remain. Painting today still speaks with a heavy 20th-century accent, but as we get further into the third decade of another century, its inflection should start to become slightly less marked.

Oliver Osborne (born 1985 in Edinburgh, lives and works in Berlin) has held solo exhibitions at Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca in 2021; Braunsfelder, Cologne in 2020; Gió Marconi, Milan in 2019; Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn in 2018; Tanya Leighton, Berlin in 2017; Peles Empire, Berlin and Vilma Gold, London in 2016; Gió Marconi, Milan and Catherine Bastide, Brussels in 2015; Frutta, Rome and Vilma Gold, London in 2013. Other recent exhibitions include ‘kSuL22svwBxgJ2Z’ at Pas une Orange, Barcelona in 2021; ‘Osborne/Empire’ at Moran Moran, Los Angeles in 2018; ‘Plant Scenery of the World’ at Inverleith House, Edinburgh, ‘Home is not a place’ at the German Embassy, London in 2017 and ‘Summerfest’ at Max Hetzler, Berlin in 2017; ‘The Written Trace’ at Paul Kasmin, New York and ‘The Funnies’ at MOT International, Brussels in 2015; ‘The Go Between’ at Museo di Capodimonte, Naples and Sprovieri, London, and ‘Everything Falls Faster Than An Anvil’ Pace Gallery, London in 2014; and ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ at ICA, London in 2012.