Jessica Silverman is delighted to represent Berlin-based painter Oliver Osborne, whose work brings the intimacy of everyday life into dialogue with the grand masters of art history. Inspired by the European canon, family photographs, and contemporary culture, Osborne translates his immediate circle into paintings that feel timeless and consequential. His work explores how painting can lend enduring relevance to fleeting moments while breathing new life into inherited forms. As Osborne explains, “I like to move freely across time, from the present to the past or wherever I decide to go. Painting has its own reality. It is a slow medium that operates by its own rules.”
Born in Edinburgh, Osborne studied at the Chelsea College of Art and the Royal Academy in London before moving to Berlin, where he lives and works today. He begins many of his paintings with collages that experiment with scale and placement. Lately, he often poses his sons, as representatives of the future, in ways that echo figures from historical paintings. The collision of these elements asks: How have our perceptions of boyhood changed from the Renaissance to the age of AI? And how has our sense of time and place shifted? What world do our children stand to inherit?
At Art Basel Paris 2026, booth C14, Jessica Silverman will present Portrait of the Artist’s Sons (2026). In this four-foot-high canvas, one son makes vigilant eye contact with the viewer while his younger brother poses as a sleeping guard, a motif popular in Renaissance painting. The sleeping guard is an authority figure in a vulnerable state, underscoring the power of consciousness. The pair are backlit by a blue sky that feathers into a shadowy painterly plane as if the boys were clear thinkers or wisps of hope in a dark, confused universe. Like the perspectives afforded by the psychological portraiture of Alice Neel and Lucian Freud, Osborne’s gaze is both tender and tough, paternal but analytical. It brings the intimacy of family life into a grand historical narrative that acknowledges the encroaching fog of contemporary culture, but stills its velocity and perforates its stress.
In Osborne's paintings, art history is not a distant inheritance but a living language, continually renewed. While his work may, at first glance, indulge in the romance of the Old Masters, they actually present a world the latter could never imagine. “My work is about the simultaneity of modern life and the online feeling of being in many places at once. The conflation of times and places is a contemporary condition.”
Over a decade ago, gallery founder and CEO Jessica Silverman visited Osborne's studio. “I was enamored then and am even more enthralled now,” she says. “Oliver is a masterful maker whose paintings speak to the past, present, and future. We are excited to build upon his celebrated European career in America and globally.”
The announcement further extends the international scope of Jessica Silverman's program and follows Osborne’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which ran in June-July 2026. Osborne will enjoy his second solo show at the gallery in 2029.
Image credit: Benedicte Sehested, courtesy of Oliver Osborne and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
