Oli Epp

Oli Epp (b. 1994, London) is a British-Canadian painter of pop surrealism — often described as Post-Digital Pop. His flat, airbrushed works blend oil, acrylic and precision taping to satirise digital-age anxieties, consumerism, identity and the tensions between humans and technology through amorphous, featureless figures and mass-culture iconography.

Epp earned a First Class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2017, following a Foundation Diploma there. His style evolved from illusionistic portraits — influenced by the painter Juan Bolivar's tape techniques — into the signature flat, graphic aesthetic that combines abstraction, realism and surrealism for ironic commentary on 21st-century life.

Autobiographical and confessional, his paintings capture mundane public-private moments with humour, pathos and tragicomic absurdity, featuring cropped, vaporous scenes of featureless figures amid consumer goods (Carpe Diem, for example, stars a McDonald's-capped creature). Works sold out pre-graduation via Instagram, and his Whistleblower achieved a record £144,900 at Phillips.

Solo exhibitions include Big Game (Richard Heller, Los Angeles, 2021), Black Swan (Semiose Galerie, Paris, 2020) and Oxymoron (Carl Kostyál, London, 2019). Group and museum shows include Real Fake Door (curated by Epp at Arsenal Contemporary, New York, 2023), Schlossmuseum Linz and König Galerie, Berlin.