Oliver Osborne: old master, new tricks

Oliver Osborne has been dubbed a ‘new Old Master’. Does this mean that he is an old soul adrift in the digital age, or that he is taking on the dedication to slow painting of the great artists of former times but with present-day subject matter? The words ‘new Old Master’ might make him sound like he makes pastiches of the past, but his work is one of the most absolute examples of a contemporary zeitgeist. Bombarded by fast images and the future breathing down their necks, a new generation of artists are turning to history. They are looking to moments in the distant past when the clarity and cohesion of the artist as a figure in society – as someone who just patiently worked in a studio and did not have to have an Instagram persona, as someone whose work related very directly to other artists in their immediate vicinity – felt secure. After a decade or more of using social media and the digital sphere to connect to other artists around the world, to bypass the middleman of dealers and gallerists, and to cultivate their own public face online, artists are tired. They don’t want to be everywhere all at once anymore. They want to switch off but can’t. Any artist who turns to historical subjects – as Osborne does, especially Renaissance Florence and the Pop of sixties New York – is making a comment on their own time as much if not more than the historical moment they seek to replicate, revise, and reimagine.

One of the most disorientating aspects of Osborne’s practice is the fact that you think you’ve seen half of them before – and, in a way, you probably have. Portrait of a Youth (after Filippo Lippi), 2025, responds to Lippi’s masterpiece held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., itself the subject of a long history of misattribution as it was for a long time believed to be made by his mentor, the Florentine master, Sandro Botticelli. When he painted it, Lippi’s career was only going in one direction, and he was riding high after recently completing Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. In one of two versions by Osborne on display here, the young man with heavy set features looks pallid and green with half sunk eyes, as though he is steadying himself from throwing up. Behind him, half veiled by shadow, is a gentle depiction of the artist’s son. Why, I ask? “It’s about the formal relationships when there is more than one figure in a painting”, Osborne says, retreating from any definitive sense that he is making some kind of link between Lippi’s youth and his own, much younger, son, who is featured in several of his paintings. There might be a temptation to find some kind of narrative that connects the two figures – the call of art historical fathers set against the parent’s responsibilities to their own child, for instance – but it’s clear that Osborne is trying to disrupt our sense of time. Time is out of step, a glitch in the matrix.

Alongside the ‘Old Master’ paintings, Osborne shows Pop-inspired works which seem a little out of place. Perhaps that’s the point. On a washed-out migraine yellow background of herringbone linen, the title work merely features ‘Ooh!’ in basic white lettering (although not quite as basic as ‘Comic Sans’, the title of Osborne’s New York show at Francis Irv gallery; that font’s designer, Vincent Connare, is reported to have referred to it as “the best joke I’ve ever told”). By showing paintings like this, Osborne reminds you that he is also trying to do something playful with his Old Master pictures. They enable him to offer up a kind of scepticism about painting’s ability to do or say anything new while doing just that. Osborne is eloquent and a real intellect, and throughout our interview I couldn’t tell if he was profoundly sincere about the exalted place of painting and its capacity to always reinvent itself, or acknowledging that painting has reached the end of the road – and why not have a bit of fun at the closing party?

Osborne is showing ‘Ooh!’ at Union Pacific in parallel ‘Comic Sans’ opening on 6th May. May Last Year (2025), the big portrait of his son perched on a ledge with an otherworldly patterning of reds hovering behind him, is a major work in London; the New York version is a study for that painting. While it is now common for an artist in the ascendency to have two representing galleries on either side of the Atlantic, they are usually choreographed to take place at different times for maximum exposure, so why did Osborne want to double up and make two bodies of works? In other words, why make life difficult for himself? “As an artist working today, you are in two places at once”, Osborne tells me. “Painting is a studio-based activity, a day-to-day rhythm, and oil painting in particular is very slow, so you are compelled to work with several layers and lots of varying drying times.”

When Osborne tells me about his practice, about his care and his dedication, it does feel somewhat anachronistic, unique even. That’s no slight on other painters who also spend all day in the studio, as most do, but there is a calm dedication to his disposition that feels out of step with today’s demands for an artist to play so many different roles – painter, promoter, partyer – simultaneously. “The digital logic is different to what I call ‘studio time’”, he goes on: “it has a simultaneous effect in which it does not matter where you are geographically.” As we talk about Lippi’s Florence, and Paris during the time of Neo-Classical history painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, or the New York of Warhol, I wonder if it’s a loss that artists are now so digitally connected but so often intimately estranged from the frenetic drivers of immediate influence, inspiration, and rivalry. These were all moments in time when the geographical meaning of where an artist worked was everything, when a painting tutor could change your life, when the milieu around these artists made up their entire artistic context. You can’t recreate that online, or not yet.

Osborne wants viewers to encounter the overlaps between his two exhibitions in London and New York. Given that they are shown simultaneously it is possible several people may get the opportunity to see both, and many more neither, but then be able to see them online on an Instagram feed or a press release and struggle to remember where they encountered them. We live lives that are both simultaneous and repetitive, happening all at once and not being truly experienced at all. Everything feels like a version of something else. “I want viewers to encounter the overlaps between the two exhibitions”, Osborne tells me. “he condition of being an artist making paintings means to be increasingly online and so repetition for an artist in the digital space is a symptom of that”.

A report published last year found that the average user spends six hours and 40 minutes per day on the internet.,We are perpetually bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of images each day. How can we keep up? How can we remember where we saw a painting, never mind anything else? In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), the philosopher Walter Benjamin suddenly realised everyone around him was engaging with art completely differently. With the advent of photography and film, paintings were stripped of what he called their “cult value” on account of their unique and unrepeatable presence (or “aura”). You could only see a painting in the place where it was physically kept, like sacred items in an inaccessible crypt, but then suddenly you could see them reproduced everywhere: in books, on posters, on T-shirts. Painting’s aura had disappeared. We are at a comparable moment of crisis for painting’s authenticity today. We are yet to understand what art means in the social media age.

With all of that said, Osborne also believes that painting hasn’t completely lost its aura. After all, we still go and see exhibitions. We are still fascinated by the figure of the artist in the studio. We fetishise seeing a painting ‘IRL’. “Painting’s strength is that it exists in strangely elongated senses of time”, Osborne tells me, “and so long after us sitting here, painting has another lifetime, perhaps a more consequential lifetime.” This hope in painting’s future is, for me at least, a cause for optimism. We are still talking about Lippi, Ingres, and Warhol today. Maybe the artist of the future will do reworkings of Osborne’s reworkings of Lippi in an endless mise-en-abyme on the futility of being able to say something new about the medium in their own time. Whatever the future holds, Osborne is one of the few artists who is genuinely grappling with the lived experience of our moment and the status of art during a time which feels increasingly hostile to its ‘aura’. Perhaps that makes him a new Old Master, perhaps merely a New Master.