Untitled

I’m delighted to donate this piece ‘Untitled, 2023’ to benefit The Museum of West African Art. It’s a pleasure to support the Nigeria Pavilion in Venice next year, curated by my dear friend Aindrea Emelife’.

– OLI EPP

Christie’s and the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Nigeria are collaborating to raise funds for MOWAA and its initiatives to create a cultural ecosystem in Benin City, based on the art of the past, present and future. A number of artists have generously agreed to donate original works of art to the auction, including Yinka Shonibare, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lakwena Maciver and Victor Ehikhamenor. Proceeds from the sale of the works will go towards MOWAA initiatives including the presentation of the Nigeria Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, 2024—commissioned by the Governor of Edo State and also curated by Aindrea Emelife—and the 20-acre Creative Campus, including the Rainforest Gallery. Designed by the Dakar-based architecture firm Worofila, the Rainforest Gallery will be dedicated to showcasing Modern and Contemporary art, as well as historic exhibitions.

London born artist Oli Epp produces artworks which corral a mixture of comedy, crisis and levity. Fascinated by our relationship with commerce, technology and our pursuit of perfection, his surreal language highlights the ways in which our growing dependence on technology can metamorphose into schemes decisively un-human. Mimicking the perfection of digital media, his cartoon-like subjects are fine-tuned and colour-saturated, infused with a sense of tragicomic pathos. His pop aesthetic, however, is underpinned by a more critical and anxious narrative, cautioning our ever-increasing, easy descent into addiction, materialism and mass consumerism.
Epp has risen to critical acclaim over the past five years. He recently co-hosted and contributed to the group show Friends and Friends of Friends, alongside curator Aindrea Emelife. Held at the Schlossmuseum in Linz, Austria, the show focused on the shifting dynamics within artistic communities in the age of social media. Epp also featured in the group exhibition Link in Bio: Art After Social Media at the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, in 2019. He won the Jealous Art Prize in 2018, and in 2017 was selected for the Espositivo Residency in Madrid, Spain. Epp’s works now feature in prominent museum collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Hall Art Foundation.