In the hyper-curated, filtered landscapes of 21st-century life, our public personas are polished to a blinding sheen. Yet, beneath the pristine glass of our smartphone screens lies a chaotic backlog of unexpressed human messiness: shame, desire, deceit, and existential dread. London-born painter Oli Epp has made a career of diagnosing this exact post-digital neurosis. In his solo exhibition Dirty Laundry, on view at Perrotin Shanghai, Epp shifts the temperature of his practice, turning his clinical, razor-edged brushwork inward to stage a brilliantly tragicomic theater of personal exposure.

A graduate of the City & Guilds of London Art School, Epp has rapidly risen to global prominence as a leading voice of “Unrealism”—a contemporary branch of surrealism shaped by the deceptive, unstable nature of images in an age where reality itself feels simulated. If his previous exhibitions felt like a lavish feast of pop-culture consumption, Dirty Laundry is the sobering morning after. The title functions as a humorous threat; laundry is mundane and repetitive, but to air it in public is taboo. It is an inventory of psychological stains displayed openly on the gallery wall.

Epp’s visual language mimics the very technology that drives our collective anxiety. His canvases feature flattened, cartoonish avatars with ballooning heads and exaggerated limbs. These naive, narcissistic figures function as externalized containers for complex psychological blockages.

The emotional architecture of Dirty Laundry relies on a sequence of highly personal mash-ups, pulling inspiration from eclectic sources like Looney Tunes physics, historical espionage, and vintage family artifacts.

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While much of the exhibition thrives on dark humor and sharp irony, Epp deliberately breaks his own comedic rhythm with Madonna, the most tender, quiet, and devastating painting in the collection.

Painted in response to a paralyzing fear of losing his mother, Madonna transforms the maternal figure into a fragile, surreal icon. She exists simultaneously as a mother, a ghost, and a mythic Tooth Fairy. Her upper torso is wildly inflated—a cartoonish, hyper-fragile distortion of safety—while a heavy, literal rope is knotted tightly around her waist, anchoring her to the bottom of the canvas in a desperate, heartbreaking attempt to keep her from floating away into death. It is an extraordinary visual manifestation of anticipatory grief.

To appreciate the maturity of the Shanghai show, it is instructive to look at how Epp’s curated environments have evolved through major institutional and gallery milestones over the last decade.

Epp understands explicitly that comedy is a formal weapon. A joke is the easiest way to slide a knife between a viewer’s ribs; the humor disarms us so that the underlying wound can hit with full force. In Lucky Strike, a fire horse with a matchstick mane looks out with the coy, fluttering eyes of Princess Diana during her infamous televised interviews—a camp, lazy war horse bred for a violence it is far too beautiful to endure.

By airing his dirty laundry at Perrotin, Epp avoids offering comfortable answers or simple resolutions to our modern cultural ailments. Instead, he invites us to revel in the sheer, exquisite pleasure of exposure. He reminds us that while the digital age demands a spotless, unwrinkled exterior, true human connection only happens when we let the stains show. Everything, eventually, comes out in the wash.