Jim Osman: A Touch of Space — Jim Osman

McKenzie Fine Art presents Jim Osman: A Touch of Space. The exhibition features additive sculptures carefully crafted and assembled in wood, primarily walnut, with pine, ash, and birch bark elements. While most works are table-top in scale, they range widely from as small as 3 inches to as large as 89. All are enhanced and articulated with color, variously using house, acrylic, or flashe paint on the wood surfaces.

Osmans abstractions have long examined our perceptions of spatial movement and how we interact with built environments, both interior and exterior. Notable in many of the new works is the use of attenuated and elongated forms, cantilevered arrangements, and a playful sense of near-precarity as elements tilt and slant in some of the assemblages. As the artist notes:

In the past I looked for motifs to be carriers or vessels for my ideas about the figure and space. In this new body of work, I realized instead of making objects that sat in space I was making spaces that were framed by my objects. Its a subtle difference but I realized that if space is handled like a material, it has a mysterious and odd quality equal to the forms that frame it.One artist who has greatly influenced me is Chardin. I love how his compositions are subtle yet vigorous. Like a simple machine, a Chardin painting works efficiently to make a complex organization of quotidian objects interrelate, and in so doing achieves a beautiful stasis. In my work, I try to combine a range of forms and motifs to express something about space, aiming for such clarity and balance. The forms might draw upon architecture or furniture. Corners, portals, benches and tables come together in a composed balance that I hope also holds surprises for the eye.

Jim Osman was born and raised in New York City and received his MFA from Queens College. He has been exhibiting his sculpture since the mid-1980s throughout the United States, in gallery and museum solo and group exhibitions, as well as outdoor installations. His work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic , Sculpture Magazine , The Brooklyn Rail , The New Criterion , The New York Sun , and Artnews , among others. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2019 and has been a member of the American Abstract Artists since 2014.