Oliver Osborne Portrait of a Fat Man (after Robert Campin)

Oliver Osborne
b. 1985
Portrait of a Fat Man (after Robert Campin)

Executed in 2021.
oil on linen
16 ¼ by 13 in. (41 by 33 cm.)

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Condition Report:
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Catalogue Note:
Oliver Osborne is a painter whose work employs elements of portraiture, still life, abstraction and text to emphasize painting itself as the primary subject. Portrait of a Fat Man (after Robert Campin), 2021, continues the artist’s ongoing appropriation of an enigmatic portrait from the Late Middle Ages by the same title. By flirting with anachronism and genre, Osborne’s studies assert their contemporary nature by visualizing the blurred simultaneity that our network of digital technologies engender. To this end, Portrait of a Fat Man stresses the malleability of its subject, calling attention to painting as a language with its own grammar and dialects.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1985, Osborne has increasingly gained attention for his enigmatic portraits of European nobility that dwell on the place of painting within modernity. The artist 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 Traceat 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. He studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and later earned a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Academy Schools in London.

Provenance:
Kindly donated by the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin