Artists

Oliver Osborne

Press release

Oliver Osborne (born in Edinburgh in 1985, lives and works in Berlin) presents a group of new works in his first solo exhibition at Paulina Caspari. The exhibition title Der Tegernseer Bauernjunge refers to August Macke’s portrait of the same name from 1910, a portrait of a village child from Macke’s Tegernsee Year, which is now in the collection of the Lenbachhaus in Munich, and alludes to Osborne’s practice, which is characterised by the intertwining of the present and the historical.

For Osborne, history does not mean the accumulation of a canonical body of knowledge, but rather a relationship that must be continually renegotiated, in which the study of older painting opens up the possibility of expanding the traditional canon and shifting the boundaries that modernism has deliberately drawn. Through his in-depth study of Cézanne’s portrait of his son, which he encountered in the Tate Modern retrospective in 2022, Osborne came to engage with the genre of children’s portraits, which is continued in the exhibition. The paintings function as amalgams in which different forms of closeness converge: the familiarity that emerges from the recognition of art-historical references and the painter’s bond with his models. In Osborne’s most recent works, it is the faces of his own children that appear in the portraits.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Pfisterer, Director of the Central Institute for Art History and, since 2006, Professor of Art History at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. After completing his doctorate at the University of Göttingen and his habilitation at the University of Hamburg, he undertook research stays at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Getty Research Centre in Los Angeles and the CASVA at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His work focuses on early modern art in Europe as well as the methodology and historiography of art history.