Oliver Osborne: The Card Players @ Jessica Silverman

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Berlin-based painter Oliver Osborne’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco, “The Card Players,” on view June 5 through July 11, 2026. Featuring new oil and acrylic paintings on herringbone linen, the exhibition situates the artist’s personal circle within the long arc of historical painting. Employing references to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Osborne’s work is at once spectral and grounded by materiality.

Before approaching the canvas, Osborne’s process begins with a preparatory practice of collaging cutouts of figures from 15th and 17th-century paintings alongside photographs of his own children. Translating these compositions into oil and acrylic, depictions of his children mirror painterly tropes, such as the sleeping guard figure commonly found in Italian frescoes, or the card games seen throughout historical group portraiture. Through these interventions, dormant characters from centuries ago become newly intimate, and Osborne becomes an active agent in shaping the history of painting. He chronicles his family with an artistic language that energizes and reconfigures, taking the viewer on an odyssey to revisit the past with an eye towards future possibilities of painting.