Exhibitions   News   Information    


Forthcoming:

Osama Al Rayyan and PaJaMa
With Galleria Federico Vavasorri
Gallery House Zurich
June 5th - June 15th, 2025
Zurich, Switzerland


Karla Kaplun
Basel Social Club
June 15th - June 21st, 2025
Basel, Switzerland


Present:

Oliver Osborne
Comic Sans
May
6th - June 14th, 2025


Past:

Osama Al Rayyan
Poets or Poems
March 26th, 2025 - April 26th, 2025



Minh-Lan Tran
Devotion disorder
January 22nd, 2025 - March 1st, 2025



Rachel Fäth & Zazou Roddam
Condo London
Hosted by Brunette Coleman
January 18th, 2025
- February 15th, 2025


Benjamin Echeverria
Paris Internationale
October 16th - 20th, 2024
Paris, France


Win McCarthy
Kingdom Come
September 7th - October 12th, 2024


A String of Tongueless Bells
July 13th - August 17th, 2024

Osama Al Rayyan, Benjamin Echeverria, Rachel Fäth, Win McCarthy, Phung-Tien Phan, Paul Sietsema



Asta Lynge
Original Room
May 24th - June 29th, 2024



Karla Kaplun
How Bright is the Sun?
March 29th - May 5th, 2024



Nine Oils
January 21st - March 9th, 2024
Anna-Sophie Berger, Sanya Kantarovsky,
Oliver Osborne, Minh-Lan Tran, Banks Violette
 

Reinhard Mucha
Kassel
November 19th - December 16th, 2023



Rachel Fäth
(Coördinator)
October 1st - October 28th, 2023



Benjamin Echeverria
May 17th - July 2nd, 2023



Benjamin Echeverria
Basel Social Club
June 11th - 28th, 2023
Basel, Switzerland


Under Machine Thing
April 6th - May 7th, 2023
Georgia Gardner Gray, Matthias Groebel,
Danny McDonald



Jake Cruzen
Bridget, Roosevelt, River, Toonie & JuJu
February 24th - March 26th, 2023


Balusters
January 13th - February 10th, 2023
Lotte Andersen, Nicholas Bierk, Asta Lynge, Ian Waelder


Angharad Williams and Sophie Gogl
November 1st - December 18th, 2022


A Fool’s Game Played by Cowards
Los Angeles, Feburary 2022





Oliver Osborne
Comic Sans
May 6th -  June 14th, 2025







What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

—“Days” by Philip Larkin

Around 1485, the painter Filippino Lippi produced a portrait of an unnamed young man. Angled to the left, the Renaissance subject has pale but luminous skin, curly brown hair; he wears a crimson cap and a blue padded jacket. Lippi had recently completed Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence—it is from the evidence of that earlier work that Lippi was credited with this painting (his tutor Botticelli was initially understood to have been the originator).

540 years later, Oliver Osborne presents Portrait of a Youth (After Filippino Lippi) III in his first solo show with Francis Irv in New York. Using Lippi’s subject, he is set against a clear blue sky framed by the edges of a stone window, opening out to an untold vista. The background in Osborne’s tribute painting to Lippi is more visually complicated; the work is an altogether taller expanse of pale gradations and cerulean washes. Instead of a window frame, an amorphous portal of submarine blue introduces another spatial dimension behind the subject’s head. The portrait is further made interesting by an under-imposed image of a younger boy’s face, his eyes gazing out from above the sitter’s left shoulder. His diaphanous apparition is ghostly, its effect akin to time-lapse. (It is the prevailing sense of contingency in this painting that makes it possible to think, then, of Gerhard Richter’s Betty.)

The essential and dynamic quality of Osborne’s work resides in his teasing-out of dogmas about artistic influence. It has been quipped that he is a “new Old Master.” The painter is evidently schooled—steeped, even—in art historical tropes and techniques. But Osborne gives himself permission to mess with the canon and ideas around convention and aesthetic purity. He works with distinct freedom from the baggage that accompanies the anxiety of influence—it’s a compelling lack thereof.

One conceptual work included in the show, titled Comic Sans, beams with lemon-yellow optimism and poses an immediate riddle about position and the occupation of space. This is the kind of gesture by Osborne that gives us license to see a kind of Kippenbergergian irreverence in his oeuvre. Those title words rendered in letters shaped decidedly unlike what the viewer might assume, given the subject’s recognizable ubiquity. Maligned and beloved, most typeface designers simply refer to Comic Sans simply as a “comic type.” (Its creator, Vincent Connare, is reported to have referred to it as “the best joke I’ve ever told.”)

Osborne uses Lead-Tin Yellow paint, which is often dubbed the “Yellow of the Old Masters”. The inherent richness of this pigment lifts the light within the flesh of children—the artist’s own sons—in the four untitled portraits in the exhibition. These are unsentimental and extraordinary, with strange, intimate gazes and postures. From Untitled (May) to the later iteration of the same portrait, the boy subject’s apprehension grows eerily more knowing, while asserting his childlike vantage point. Stripped of nostalgia, this series nonetheless brings to mind Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, in all its reconstructive passion and longitudinal tracking. Osborne loops back, again and again, and there is no room for accidental repetitions.

Osborne’s sincerity as a painter is established by the intricacy of his brushwork; the sleights of perspective; his devotion to the daily work of a studio artist. Nowhere is this as discernible as in The Sleeping Guard, in which the shadow and contours on herringbone canvas throw into rich relief the model’s gentle postural collapse, the curve of his delicate philtrum and the index finger pointing down. This painting borrows the idea of dutiful repose that one can see in Piero della Francesca’s detail in The Resurrection, but the hybridized inversion of both character (a child versus a man) and the placement of hands signals what Osborne is so adept at provoking: all artists descend from a long line of predecessors, but it is the time over again—for this artist, that certainty of repeated days and Philip Larkin’s “time and time over”—that brings this work so firmly into the contemporary.

— Emmie Francis



 



Oliver Osborne (b. 1985, Edinburgh) lives and works in Berlin. Selected solo exhibtions have been held at Fondazione ICA Milano (forthcoming); Union Pacific, London (2025, 2022); Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin & Los Angeles (2024, 2023); Marc Jancou, Saanen (2024); Galeria Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca (2023); JVDW, Düsseldorf (2022); Braunsfelder, Cologne (2020); Giò Marconi, Milan (2019) and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2018). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Seishodo THE ROOM, Kyoto (2024); Paulina Caspari Gallery, Munich (2024); C L E A R I N G, New York (2024); Francis Irv, New York (2024); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2020); Peles Empire, Berlin, Germany (2019); Galerie Max Hetzler (2017); Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2017); Museo di Capodimonte, Naples and Sprovieri, Italy (2014).








Oliver Osborne
Untitled (May)
2024-25
Oil on herringbone linen
9⅞ x 7⅞ x 1⅛ in.
25.00 x 20.00 x 3.00 cm
15 x 13 x 2⅜ in. (framed)
38.00 x 33.00 x 6.00 cm (framed)







Oliver Osborne
Comic Sans
2025
Oil on herringbone linen
50½ x 43½ x 1⅛ in.
128.30 x 110.50 x 3.00 cm
51¼ x 44¼ x 2 in. (framed)
130.30 x 112.50 x 5.00 cm (framed)





Oliver Osborne
Multi-Figure Composition
2024-25
Oil on herringbone linen
13¾ x 11¾ x 1⅛ in.
35.00 x 30.00 x 3.00 cm
18⅞ x 16⅞ x 2⅜ in. (framed)
48.00 x 43.00 x 6.00 cm (framed)






Oliver Osborne
Portrait of a Youth (after Filippino Lippi) III
2025
Oil on linen
50½ x 17⅞ x 1⅛ in.
128.30 x 45.30 x 3.00 cm
54 x 21⅜ x 2⅜ in. (framed)
137.30 x 54.30 x 6.00 cm (framed)




Oliver Osborne
Untitled
2025
Oil on herringbone linen
19¾ x 11¾ x 1⅛ in.
50.00 x 30.00 x 3.00 cm
24¾ x 16⅞ x 2⅜ in. (framed)
63.00 x 43.00 x 6.00 cm (framed)






Oliver Osborne
The Sleeping Guard
2025
Oil on herringbone linen
29¾ x 17⅞ x 1⅛ in.
75.50 x 45.50 x 3.00 cm
34⅞ x 23 x 2⅜ in. (framed)
88.50 x 58.50 x 6.00 cm (framed)






Osama Al Rayyan
Poets or Poems
March 26 - April 26, 2025







Francis Irv is pleased to announce the opening of Osama Al Rayyan’s Poets or Poems. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in New York.

Can a painting be a poem and its author a poet? Can a painting be a poet and its subject a poem? Can a painting be a poem and its subject a poet? Can a painting be a poet and its author a poem?

The paintings of Osama occupy this ambivalence. The formal structure of the work and the figures that populate it have no separation. There is no before and after, no setting, no narrative, no dialect of allusions. Yet, there are precise elements that make the paintings: There is speed, or what we perceive as speed, and the confidence in their making—the paintings are built. Then, there is air; things breathe, but an air that has crystallized, a very dense air, like honey or resin turning into amber.

For this show, straight lines have surfaced more prominently. They delimit a space, offering a more defined per- spective. Often, we are on the other side; the lines cut the space horizontally, turning into a wall or containment device. The lines keep us out or keep them in. The lines are a formal expedient, looking as if they were used to clean up the brush from loaded color or just to slice. I think they are purely ways to deal with the space of the canvas—and the artist, when asked, was of the same opinion. But as much as the structure and the subjects have such a strong bond, this cannot be said about the viewer who sits outside while the figures in the paintings turn their backs, or just look away.

- Giangiacomo Rossetti

 


Osama Al Rayyan (b. 1995, Damascus) lives and works in Basel. Selected solo exhibitions include Braunsfelder, Cologne (2024); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2024); Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2022, 2021); Magic Stop, Lausanne (2022). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Francis Irv, New York (2024); Ex-Cinema Eldorado, Lausanne (2023); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich (2023); Mendes Wood DM at d’Ouwe Kerke, Retranchement (2023); suns. works, Zurich (2022); Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2022); Sonnenstube, Lugano (2022); Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2021 & 2019); Riverside, Basel (2021).







Osama Al Rayyan
Untitled
2025
Oil on canvas
31½ x 20⅞ in.
80.00 x 53.00 cm







Osama Al Rayyan
Untitled
2025
Oil on canvas
63 x 55⅛ in.
160.00 x 140.00 cm





Osama Al Rayyan
Untitled
2025
Oil on canvas
27½ x 20⅞ in.
70.00 x 53.00 cm






Osama Al Rayyan
Untitled
2024
Oil on canvas
55 1/8 x 47 1/4 in.
140.00 x 120.00 cm




Osama Al Rayyan
Untitled, 2025
Oil on canvas
63 x 55⅛ in.
160.00 x 140.00 cm






Minh-Lan Tran
Devotion disorder
January 22nd - March 1st, 2025






Invisible presences tug us this way and that, luring us one way and regularly deflecting us onto different paths, but seldom are they described. Minh Lan Tran works to give form to such presences in order to lay them to rest. The artist crafts her own egg tempera in a process borrowed from traditional techniques used for early Byzantine icon paintings—an era in which theories of the image and the ethics of representing the divine began to be negotiated. She breaks the methods apart as she shreds, burns, and battles her surfaces that look like the slits of a veil. Tran’s titles suggest innards and fault lines on the body, the matter that arises after cataclysmic disruptions fissure the mind. Engaging in a politics of utterance, the artist aims to restore a power to signify, and give birth to an expression of experience by experience. She listens for the divine utterance that she seeks to make manifest, flirting with the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the image and the spirit that experiences of the visible world disclose. If consciousness is a shield against the wound that constitutes desire and being, this lack is beyond anything which can represent it; it is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil.

- Hiji Nam




Minh-Lan Tran (b. 1997, Hong Kong) lives and works in Paris. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Parliament, Paris (2024); Jan Kaps, Cologne (2023); Harlesdon High Street, London (2023); and a performance at Sadie Coles, Lon- don (2023). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Balice Hertling, Paris (2024); High Art, Seoul (2024); François Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2024); Francis Irv, New York (2024); Museum of the Home, London (2023); Jan Kaps, Cologne (2023); House, Berlin (2023); and Roman Road, London (2023). Tran graduated from Courtauld Institute (MA Byzantine Studies) in 2020 and Royal College of Art (MA Painting) in 2023.





Minh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis IrvMinh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis IrvMinh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis IrvMinh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis IrvMinh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis Irv


Minh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis Irv
Minh-Lan Tran
Blood in the sun
2024
Egg, pigment, paper, fabric and oil on linen
47¼ x 29½ in.
120.00 x 75.00 cm


Minh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis Irv


Minh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis Irv
Minh-Lan Tran
Primal matter
2024
Egg, pigment, paper and oil on linen
78¾ x 70⅞ in.
200.00 x 180.00 cm

Minh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis Irv



Minh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis Irv
Minh-Lan Tran
First break
2024
Egg, pigment, paper, fabric and oil on linen
70⅞ x 43¼ in.
180.00 x 110.00 cm


Minh-Lan Tran Devotion Disorder Francis Irv




Rachel Fäth and Zazou Roddam
Condo London
Hosted by Brunette Coleman
January 18th - February 15th, 2025



Elephant Magazine
Flash-Art
Frieze
e-flux
Another Magazine
Dazed











Brunette Coleman, London and Francis Irv, New York are pleased to present a duo exhibition of new works by Rachel Fäth and Zazou Roddam on the occasion of Condo London, 2025. Rachel Fäth debuts a new series of work entitled Lockers. Composed of discarded steel scraps, their sculptural form is determined by the size constraints of the storage lockers at a community workspace, each work a negative impression of a locker’s interior. Zazou Roddam sources her material through various public auctions and salvage yards, using unconventional modes of preservation to retain evidence of the objects’ previous owners. Through a playful manipulation of form, Roddam questions how and what we attribute significance to.


Rachel Fäth (b. 1991, Berlin) lives and works in New York. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include le vite, Milan (2024); Francis Irv, New York (2023); diez, Amsterdam (2023); Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin (2022); Loggia Loggia, Munich (2022); Mauer, Cologne (2022). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Francis Irv, (2024); le vite, Milan (2024); Kai Matsumyia, New York (2023); New Jörg, Vienna (2023); Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin (2022); Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2022); Lomex, New York (2022); Haus Wien, Vienna (2021).

Zazou Roddam (b. 2000, London) lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include: Hans Goodrich, Chicago (2024), Brunette Coleman, London (2023), 126 Eldridge Street, New York (2023).




Installation view of Brunette Coleman gallery during Condo. Two sculptures by Rachel Fäth are on the floor, while Zazou Roddam has a sculpture on mounted to the west wall, and a framed photograph on the east wall.  Installation view of Brunette Coleman gallery during Condo. Two sculptures by Rachel Fäth are on the floor, while Zazou Roddam has a sculpture on mounted to the west wall, and a framed photograph on the east wall.  Installation view of Brunette Coleman gallery during Condo. Two sculptures by Rachel Fäth are on the floor, while Zazou Roddam has a sculpture on mounted to the west wall, and a framed photograph on the east wall.  Installation view of Brunette Coleman gallery during Condo. Two sculptures by Rachel Fäth are on the floor, while Zazou Roddam has a sculpture on mounted to the west wall, and a framed photograph on the east wall.  Installation view of Brunette Coleman gallery during Condo. Two sculptures by Rachel Fäth are on the floor, while Zazou Roddam has a sculpture on mounted to the west wall, and a framed photograph on the east wall.  Installation view of Brunette Coleman gallery during Condo. Two sculptures by Rachel Fäth are on the floor, while Zazou Roddam has a sculpture on mounted to the west wall, and a framed photograph on the east wall.


Steel sculpture by the artist Rachel Fäth
Rachel Fäth
Locker 5
2024
Steel
22 x 9 x 14½ in.
55.88 x 22.86 x 36.83 cm


Steel sculpture by the artist Rachel FäthSteel sculpture by the artist Rachel FäthSteel sculpture by the artist Rachel Fäth



Steel sculpture by the artist Rachel Fäth
Rachel Fäth
Locker 6
2024
Steel
22 x 8 x 13 in.
55.88 x 20.32 x 33.02 cm


 Steel sculpture by the artist Rachel FäthSteel sculpture by the artist Rachel FäthSteel sculpture by the artist Rachel Fäth



Sculpture by Zazou Roddam
Zazou Roddam
Lot 2454/ Lot 5152
2024–2025
Crystal door handles with hardware, plexiglass
60.63 × 11.81 × 8.66 inches
154 x 30 x 22 cm


Sculpture by Zazou Roddam
Sculpture by Zazou Roddam


Framed photograph by Zazou Roddam
Zazou Roddam
Lot 52 (2)
2025
Polaroid print, framed
12.6 × 17.13 × 1.57 inches
32×43.5×4cm



Sculpture by Zazou Roddam
Zazou Roddam
Desert Rose
2024-2025
Aluminium fans, stainless steel, doorbell transformer and bell
19.69 × 8.27 × 8.27 inches
50 x 21 x 21 cm


Sculpture by Zazou Roddam
Sculpture by Zazou RoddamSculpture by Zazou Roddam
Documentation by Jack Elliot Edwads



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