The works on view build upon Osborne's longstanding interest in locating painting’s identity within the horizon of our globally networked visual culture. 

It is not yet fully apparent what constitutes twenty-first-century painting or how it might disentangle itself from the long shadow of the West’s triumphal narratives of art. Pursuing this question, Osborne uses anachronism to subtly scramble painting’s many grammars to introduce the inflections of one period into another and play with the tradition's languages and our fluency with them. The new paintings in this exhibition use portraiture as an archetype to enjoy the tradition’s odd ability to combine the legible with the ineffable.