Oli Epp

A London painter of the screen age

Oli Epp was born in London in 1994 and belongs to the first generation of painters who grew up entirely surrounded by digital technology. He graduated from the City and Guilds of London Art School and still works in London. His subject is the tragicomic side of life in this century: the muddle of identity in the digital age, and the kind of consumption that turns into control, craving and addiction. His humour is caustic and aimed at habits the viewer probably shares, which is what keeps the pictures from being merely charming.

How the pictures work

A painting usually begins as an instinctive drawing, passes through Photoshop, and ends as a canvas combining oil, acrylic and spray. The surfaces are deliberately smooth: polished flat areas of colour set against softer zones worked with an airbrush, and a light that seems to come from behind the image, like a screen lit from the back. His figures are human silhouettes reduced to the bare minimum, frequently faceless, defined instead by the branded objects attached to them, a cup, a phone, a pair of sunglasses, a plaster. Read quickly they look like pictograms or advertising. Read slowly they are a parody of everyday ritual, and the apparent ease of reading them hides a social satire of unusual depth.

Galleries, museums and collections

Semiose in Paris organised his first gallery solo exhibition in 2018 and has shown him repeatedly since, in 2020, in 2022 and again in 2025. In 2025 the NTNU Art Museum in Taipei devoted a solo exhibition to his work, accompanied by a catalogue. Among his group appearances are Art Without Borders at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2023 and Cat People at the contemporary art centre in Noisy le Sec in 2025. He has also worked as a curator, organising exhibitions at the Perrotin gallery in Paris and at Arsenal Contemporary in Montreal, and he has held a number of residencies and won several prizes. His paintings have entered the Blanca and Borja Thyssen Bornemisza Collection in Madrid, the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

What the market has paid

Epp is one of the painters whose prices moved violently in the speculative wave around the turn of the decade, and a seller should read his auction record with that in mind. In 2021 at Phillips in London, Whistleblower, an oil on canvas of a whistle blowing figure measuring roughly one hundred and thirty by one hundred and twelve centimetres, carried a modest estimate and made GBP 144,900, close to ten times the lower figure it had been expected to reach. That result belongs to a particular moment of the market rather than to a settled level, and the works that have come up since, editions and smaller canvases among them, have traded well below it. For a valuation the relevant questions are the ordinary ones: whether the work is a unique canvas or comes from an edition, its date, its size, its condition and its exhibition history.