Osmar Osten is attentive not to a static excerpt of a landscape, but to how that landscape changes as one travels past it. Although he seems to enjoy having landscape pass him by, his gaze is nevertheless captivated by chance appearances: birds, fish, people, snowmen, windows or bridges. For this reason, the motifs in his paintings seem as if they might have been captured merely by the way. Occasionally they are extended by means of words. Not only do the depiction and the paint application have a fleeting lightness about them, so does his handling of language.

Osmar Osten is an artist who not only sees ‘outside the box’, but also thinks outside the box. His paintings are imbued with a unique humour and he chooses his motifs with the eye of a child, while interpreting them with the irony of an adult.

Biography

1959 born in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz)

1980–1985 studied painting and graphic art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden

since 1985 free artist in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz) and Dresden

1991–1995 lectureship at the Fachschule für Angewandte Kunst, Schneeberg

1997 awarded the Bruno Paul Prize, Chemnitz

2002 member of the Sächsische Akademie der Künste

2008 scholarship from the Internationale Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, Bamberg