SAANEN.- From the 10th of February to the 31st of March 2024 Marc Jancou Contemporary presents the first exhibition of Oliver Osborne in Switzerland titled Grund und Figur. Borrowing its title from a term used in Gestalt psychology to describe the concept of figure-ground, ie. the perceptual grouping that is a vital necessity for recognizing objects through vision, the exhibition at the Saanen Vitrine brings together a selection of recent works, both paintings and works on paper, all completed in the past year.

Since the distant days of the 1990s bodies of work made by artists dealing with paintings and Painting started progressively looking back at history and its representational codes. Returning to things is not a novelty of the late 20th century, however. Artists have been running up and down the place since antiquity; opening cabinets, flipping through the pages of dusty books, sneakily eavesdropping on their elderly neighbors with the hope of catching any secrets. Conversely, the shift following the establishment and institutionalization of conceptualisms and the drastic valorization of digital technologies gave forms and gazes a different meaning. Sometimes this “turning around” evolves into a productive state enabling insightful and meaningful arguments with grandparents, institutions, and public discourses. Other times, it fizzles away instantly, barely making itself seen.

Grund und Figur shows new works by Oliver Osborne. All were made within the last year and work within painting and drawing, in oil on linen and carbon on paper. The title is a German term used in Gestalt psychology to describe the perceptual binary between a background and an overlaying figure. In the past, Oliver has painted plastic plants, silently imprinted with hearts, glossy, squeaky clean, brand new, as well as a portrait series of former German chancellor Angela Merkel, a political figure of great rigor and controversy for many people. He has also painted variations of Robert Campin’s A Portrait of a Fat Man, and several iterations of a close-up of Elisabeth of the Palatinate, a minor 17th-century princess, daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, the so-called Winter Queen of Bohemia. Recently, Oliver painted for the first time a portrait of his son, a work properly titled Portrait of the Artist’s Son, after a Cézanne title of the same subject.

In essence, the perceptual concept of “Grund und Figur”, conceives the figure as the object or shape that stands out and captures our attention, while the ground is the surrounding space against which the figure is perceived. This relationship is crucial for recognizing and making sense of the visual world. Our minds naturally organize visual information by separating the figure from the ground, enabling us to perceive distinct forms and shapes. This perceptive tool proves to be rather complicated once embedded within painterly disputes of the digital age. A series of factors allow the figure to leave the picture. Color, shape, size, definition, edge, movement, power, and honesty are only some on my list. All these things play a crucial role in visual organization at their own pace. Read within the spectrum of discussions framing digitality and image-making in the lineage of the histories of painting, proposes a critical reassessment of the “Grund und Figur” principle.

For a while, the entire history of painting, at least propagated as an entirety, was conceived as an inquiry into the possibilities of “Grund und Figur”. The medium received the treatment of a documentation device, a means of rendering visible and traceable the optical plane of reality. What the mind can see gets to lay flat and translucent in front of our very eyes and we can’t do anything but believe in it. The story goes that the invention of photography enabled a whole new world of images, figures, grounds, trees, and facts to come to life; something that would inevitably put painting out of its misery. This was never the whole truth, even though for many people it was seen as such for a long time. The whole story is a porous tale with multiple trajectories and diversions, never reaching its promised denouement. Reflecting on the rich historiographies of such fairytales allows a new generation of artists working within the medium to assert a different right to it. Introducing the parameters of the digital world and its images grants far more complexity. Thus, if representation, in its traditional sense, is allowed to enter the field here, it’s more with a sense of rethinking, a net of annotations, as a conceptual thread informing the reception and perception of what painting does and can do. This however should not be conflated with trust in the medium’s abilities and means of depicting the Real. They know about their deceit; about what their maker has endowed them with, they are aware of their groundless figures, their hollow depths. And yet they could not be happier than to accept their fate.

Oliver Osborne (1985) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Solo exhibitions include: Manganese Blue, Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca (2023), Recent Painting, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles (2023), Mantegna’s Dead Christ, Union Pacific, London (2022), Portrait of a Fat Man for Düsseldorf, JVDW, Düsseldorf, Germany (2022), Der Kleine Angsthase, Braunsfelder, Cologne, Germany (2020), Birth, Education, Leisure, Death, Giò Marconi, Milan, Italy (2019) and Bonnie, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2018). Selected group exhibitions include: Day by Day, Good Day (curated by Ted Targett), Union Pacific, London (2022), Triple Burner, Union Pacific, London (2021), HEART–100 artists, 1 mission, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2020), Editions, Peles Empire, Berlin, Germany (2019), and The Go Between (curated by Eugenio Viola), Museo di Capodimonte, Naples and Sprovieri, Italy (2014), amongst others. Grund und Figur is Oliver Osborne's first exhibition in Switzerland.