Oli Epp

Oli Epp was born in 1994 in London, where he still lives and works; he has described himself as "half Canadian, half British," noting that his parents are both from Canada. He trained at the City & Guilds of London Art School, completing a Foundation Diploma in 2014 and a BA (Hons) Fine Art, First Class, in 2017.

Epp paints faceless, contorted figures gripping cigarettes, cash, and branded goods in flat, airbrushed layers of oil and acrylic, a style he began calling "Post-Digital Pop" in 2017 to describe paintings built around the tragicomedy of consumer culture and digital-age identity. His first gallery solo, Epiphanies, opened at Semiose in Paris in 2018, and he has since had repeated solo exhibitions with Semiose, with Carl Kostyal in London and Stockholm, and with Perrotin in New York and Paris. In 2025, the NTNU Art Museum in Taipei mounted Hors d'oeuvres, a solo museum presentation of his recent paintings organized in collaboration with Semiose.

Epp's paintings pair a flat, poster-like surface with contorted, faceless figures holding money, cigarettes, and branded products, a combination he has framed under the term "Post-Digital Pop" since 2017. Critics and curators have generally read the work through that lens: consumer branding, advertising, and social media as sources of anxiety and identity confusion, rendered with dark humor rather than didacticism. His path from a 2018 debut solo at Semiose in Paris to a 2025 institutional solo at the NTNU Art Museum in Taipei traces a fairly rapid move from gallery context toward museum programming. No verbatim assessment from a named critic at a major art publication could be confirmed for direct quotation as of this writing.

Epp's auction market changed abruptly in 2021. Whistleblower (2017) sold for GBP 144,900 (about USD 201,000) at Phillips London's New Now sale on 13 July 2021, roughly ten times its high estimate and the best-documented result in his auction history, following prior results that had not exceeded a few thousand pounds. A small number of compiled market sources also cite a higher price for a 2021 work titled Love Song, but no primary auction-house record for that sale could be independently confirmed, so it is treated here with caution rather than as a confirmed record. His momentum continued at Artcurial in Paris, where Chewing, Listening, Thinking (2020) sold for USD 63,800, well above its low estimate, in a sale reported in late 2024. His work is held in the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and prints are in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, alongside placements in the Hall Art Foundation and the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

Epp is an early-career artist with a short auction history, so any single result, including the GBP 144,900 paid for Whistleblower at Phillips in 2021, should be weighed with more caution than a figure backed by decades of resale data. There is no catalogue raisonne and no documented certificate-of-authenticity program, which puts extra weight on provenance and on verification through his representing galleries, Perrotin and Semiose. Institutional momentum is building, most visibly through the 2025 museum solo in Taipei, but current pricing and demand are still shaped mainly by primary-market gallery activity rather than a deep secondary market.