McKenzie Fine Art: Jim Osman 2024 Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467

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	Jim Osman Walnut 3 October 25 - December 21, 2024
	Jim Osman’s constructions in wood explore the perception of space and the built world. Inspired by architecture and furniture, the artist notes that in this new body of work “I was also looking more directly at painting as well as craft.” With one exception, all the sculptures are table-top size, yet they are not maquettes or miniaturizations. They often possess a disarming monumentality, fluidly shifting scale between architectonic constructions and literal, physical objects. Osman uses a full range of wood species in his additive sculptures, ranging from lowly pine to noble walnut, including off-cuts, found logs, and bark. He pieces together discrete, irregular elements with a variety of fasteners, glues, and joinery to create witty and sophisticated sculptures. The flowing patterns of wood grain, the whorl of knots, the physicality of rough-hewn bark, irregular voids, jagged cracks, gouges, and cut marks are all exploited for their visual properties. The use of color is an equally important aspect: Osman uses painted elements as accent and punctuation, and to impart volumetric space, depth, and movement. Translucent color washes enhance the natural wood grain in some elements while flatly painted areas and linear elements highlight geometric facets of the forms. The structures are at times off-kilter, and as the viewer moves around them, pleasurable surprises and discoveries continually emerge. Osman was given some 100-year-old house beams, covered in paint, which led to the sole large-scale work in the show, Clock. Planing the beams revealed glowing pine with notable cracks, and as he began to play with their arrangement, stacking, leaning, and standing them, a linear sculpture emerged. It is suggestive of a portal as much as a figure, with a pathway demarcating the space. As the artist added color accents at the beam ends and circled the piece to make sure it was working well “in the round,” he noted that “in the process I felt that time was becoming part of the work, and only when it was done, did I realize a time-based aesthetic had permeated the work, hence the title.” 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; he currently serves as its President.