Oliver Osborne
German Afternoons
05 Jul - 27 Aug 2022
Tanya Leighton is pleased to announce ‘German Afternoons’, an exhibition of new works by Oliver Osborne. Made over the last year, the exhibition presents paintings 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” of Bohemia. 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.
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” of Bohemia. 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.