We Ain't dED Yet

A very special thank you to Baldwin Contemporary for their support. 

“To participate in Art The Arms Fair this year will be a wonderful opportunity both to protest against the senseless commercialisation of war, and in some small way to lend my voice along with some hugely talented artists in supporting the commendable work of dED_ucation.  Plus it’s one in the eye for Oxford University, who turned me down for a modern languages degree and forced me into a life of painting crap for a living. C’est la vie, I suppose.” - EPI

https://www.epi-art.com
@_epi_____

Epi (b. 1985) is a British multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Bath. His formative years were spent in Paris and since the 2000's his stencilled quotations from the French literary canon began to appear on walls around the city.  Rather than the widespread acclaim and adulation he had hoped for, his efforts earned him near-universal condemnation and opprobrium, not to mention the ire of the Gendarmerie Nationale. 

Heavily influenced by the Stencil Movement that had its roots in the 1960's Parisian political protest art, Epi later returned to Britain and adapted his artistic style, eschewing wall for canvas and appropriating and recapitulating tropes from the canon of contemporary art in his own inimitable and oft-derided-style, developing a somewhat lacklustre and clumsy ‘technique’ that would incorporate graffiti, Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop and mid-century poster art. 

At the heart of Epi's work lies a deeply held disdain for the art establishment - whose ignorance, pretentiousness and capriciousness he has long found abhorrent - and an unwavering desire to poke fun at his chosen métier. 

With his work variously described by critics as “a complete insult to good taste”, “execrable shite”, “the mindless daubing of a sick and deranged infant”, and even “absolute drivel” (by his own mother, at that), Epi still maintains that his primary goal is to satirise the absurdity and inanity of contemporary art, seeing himself not as an artist (a sentiment resoundingly echoed by collectors and gallerists alike) but rather a cultural commentator mining the lexicon of the visual zeitgeist to communicate some deeper truth about the abhorrence of consumer culture gone woefully awry at the hands of a venal and deranged bourgeoisie. 

Epi endeavours to bring his work into the reach of a broad base of art buyers - eyeing with disdain the opaque, morally bankrupt world of blue-chip art dealing - until such a day that his work starts going for serious money, when he will tell his loyal clients to fuck off, start selling his works exclusively to a small coterie of ultra-rich philistines, and piss it up around the Med on his yacht. 

He hopes that one day, long after his death, he will finally get the recognition he doesn't deserve. 

EXHIBITIONS

Best of Black and White, Clifton Gallery, Bristol, 2023
The British Urban Edit, Baldwin Contemporary, 2023
The Colour Edit, Baldwin Contemporary, 2023