13/05/2023 - 27/05/2023
Contemporary - Painting
Oli Epp - Shampoo
Tue-Fri: 9-5pm; Sat: 10-4pm
Carl Kostyál is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by London born and raised artist Oli Epp, his third with the gallery.
"How to picture the human subject today? How, more specifically, to continue the longstanding project of painting people as they are in the artist’s era—and thus, today, represent body and mind as violently reshaped by twenty-first-century technocratic capitalism?
Oli Epp (b. 1994, London, UK) succeeds and without reducing his art to anything like illustration or sheer, weary social commentary. His paintings—begun as instinctive drawings, passing through Photoshop and then spun out in seductive yet unnerving canvases whose impeccably punchy compositions combine oil, acrylic and spray—pop vivaciously whether seen in person or onscreen. At first glance, they’re pleasurable things: typically, though not always, focused on a single figure (or, perhaps, entity), they have a cartoonish brightness about them and as the eye slides over their wipe-clean surfaces, smoothly gradated fields of colour and fluent bursts of Photorealism, they’re gratifying to look at. But all of this, it’s quickly apparent, serves as a counterweight to an abundant anxiety concerning what we are morphing into as a species."
-Martin Herbert
Mayfair 12a Savile Row, W1S 3PQ