About
Samantha Lee Osner
A South African artist working in Hout Bay, Cape Town. She paints, works in mixed media, and uses the camera as part of a wider creative process, often as the starting point for a layered artwork rather than the end of it.
Her story
A gap year that never ended
Samantha Lee Osner matriculated in 2012 and was choosing between Stellenbosch and UCT when she decided to take a gap year instead. In 2013 she sat in on one of her father Martin Osner’s lectures, borrowed his camera and tripod, and never looked back.
She took his landscape class three times, assisted on every class he taught, and learnt lighting in commercial photography before turning to fine art. In May 2018 she held her first exhibition, Daydreams, a collection of soft pinhole photographs, at the Art Photography Gallery in Cape Town.
When the gallery in Hout Bay was about to open, the landscape photographer Koos van der Lende gave Martin some advice: give her half the walls. “I actually think she is probably going to be better than you.” He did. Today they run Osner Gallery together, and every November they open a father and daughter exhibition.
In 2020, when Covid stopped teaching in person, it was her idea to put Martin on Zoom. That became the online student base, and in 2023 the foundation of the Art Photography Academy, where she wrote and teaches the Photoshop course.
How she works
Paint, transfers, overlays and light
The work moves freely between media. The Précis canvases are painted in ink, oil and acrylic. Other works begin as a photograph that is painted over, transferred onto metal with paint and texture, finished with black powder and gold leaf, or cut and assembled by hand into three dimensional montage. Some are made entirely inside the camera, with multiple exposures, movement or a pinhole.
What ties it together is the feeling: minimal, soft, feminine and calm.
See the seven bodies of work
Commissions
Made for a particular wall
Samantha Lee Osner takes a small number of commissions each year, from a Précis painting in a chosen palette to a work sized for a specific room.
Ask about a commission Exhibitions