Perrotin presents Clear History, a group exhibition of international artists curated by artist Oli Epp that stages a visual conversation between digital erasure and material permanence, authenticity and artifice, taboo and prestige.
The term “Clear History” is part of a broader lexicon of web vernacular and evokes our daily digital rituals. Terms like “The Cloud”, “Hot Spot”, “Portal”, and “Window” conjure visions of ethereal lightness and technological transcendence. These words promise transparency and transformation, even as they mask the weight of their physical infrastructure. “Clear” becomes both verb and adjective – suggesting obstruction and transparency, deletion, and visibility.
Yet history resists such ethereal treatment – it's messy, woven with contradictions and half-truths that refuse to be cleared with a simple click. In an era where technology promises to edit, revise, and reinvent our past into something as thin as a screen, these artworks reveal what lies beneath our attempts at erasure. They record, reinvent, and freeze moments with one eye on the past and another squinting toward an uncertain future.
Intimately versed in both the effervescent and constraining dynamics of the contemporary art world, Epp composed a show that balances conceptual fluidity with formal rigor. The result is an environment where physicality reasserts itself – dripping, popping, crunching, and fogging up our glasses – while subtly addressing the immaterial currents that shape our contemporary experience.
Cornelia Baltes initiates this material dialogue through works that hover between abstraction and recognition. Her playful compositions suggest bodily forms – torsos, eyes, breasts – through bold color fields that create afterimages in our vision, like optical imprints that persist even after we look away. These seemingly simple forms, rendered with precisely controlled pigments that alternately mask and reveal the raw canvas, echo the exhibition's central theme: the impossibility of complete erasure, where each attempt at clearing away creates its own form of marking.
Sally Kindberg extends this exploration into more satirical territory, her paintings capturing fragments of bodies in velvety iridescent and latex textures that speak to both the polish and absurdity of contemporary life.
These investigations of authenticity and presence find different expression in Maja Djordjevic's meticulously crafted paintings, which transform pixelated aesthetics into profound investigations of identity. This interplay between appearance and reality continues in Alison Jackson's photographs, where orchestrated scenes with political lookalikes probe our inability – or unwillingness – to distinguish truth from fiction in our image-saturated world.
Works like Tammi Campbell's Elvis add more layers to this exploration of cultural iconography. Viewed through a rippled layer of bubble wrap, the familiar face becomes both protected and distorted. The work creates a temporal collision between past and present, the satisfying snap of packaging material becomes a metaphor for the layers that simultaneously preserve and distort our relationship to images, icons, and memory.
The exhibition's investigation of presence and absence extends into more visceral territory through works that explore hybrid forms and material transformation. Benjamin Spiers' contorted figures mark a shift toward more metamorphic visions of the body. His twisted, luminous forms hover between classical sculpture and science fiction, their impossible anatomies suggesting beings who inhabit the threshold between historical reference and hallucinatory futures.
Salomé Chatriot's cool-surfaced curves present contemporary totems that embody the entanglement of our desires and physical existence. In Harrison Pearce's work, a pearl-like orb nests in an ergonomic shelter, evoking the slow transformation of matter into meaning through the reciprocal relationship between organic form and architectural intention. Liao Wen's hand-carved elements and Ally Rosenberg's automotive-finished surfaces contrast their toothy and tentacular forms further probing this dialogue between nature and fabrication.
The exhibition culminates in a dreamscape of familiar forms pushed just beyond recognition, where spectral presences linger in the negative space – trailing laughter, fading warmth, and bright ideas dimmed by time. Like digital artifacts that refuse to be fully deleted, these traces persist, leaving a trail that leads both forward and back. Christopher Hartmann's photorealistic paintings embody this ethereal quality through layers of oil paint that mirror digital processes, where contrasts of warm and cool tones play across silken folds of bedsheets, conjuring the warmth of bodies no longer present. These works capture moments suspended in time, each canvas a testament to the capacity to hold contradictory states of being.
In this contemplation of presence and absence, Devan Shimoyama's monumental multimedia portraits command the space with sensual authority and material abundance. In works like Spray and Stream, he transforms intimate gestures into moments of transcendent beauty through his masterful manipulation of oil, glitter, and crystals, creating portals where desire and transformation collide.
The artists in Clear History speak to each other across mediums and methodologies, their works creating a constellation of responses to our contemporary condition. Like the web vernacular that inspired its title, the exhibition plays with the meaning of transparency and opacity. These works assert their stubborn materiality – they drip, shine, stretch, and transform. Like history itself, they refuse the easy promises of our digital lexicon. Inside every cloud, portal, and window lies a physical world deeply imbricated into our senses. As we resign ourselves to the hallucination, we find ourselves adapting to – even appreciating – the simulation. Yet these works remind us that there is no true separation between virtual and material existence, only an endless cycle of cleaning and marking, where touch and sight, presence and absence, become indistinguishable from one another.
Text by Anitra Lourie, researcher at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Born in 1994 in London, United Kingdom
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Oli Epp’s paintings circulate a number of themes to do with the tragicomic element of living in the 21st century society, dealing with the complexity of identity and anxieties living in the digital age; consumerism and consumption which leads to control and addiction, anxiety and conflict. The paintings work in an endlessly cyclical way of Epp ironically questioning idealisms and our pursuit of perfection and the conflict that arises as a result. The overall aesthetic of Epp’s paintings conveys the digital world; mimicking the screen, toying with the physicality of surface.
More about the artist
Born in 1978 in Mönchengladbach, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Cornelia Baltes is a German artist known for her paintings and installations that stand on theedge of abstraction and figuration.
Corporeal elements, often captured in motion, are teased out of bold colour fields and gestural forms that combine to hint at a narrative in pictorial space. In crystallising ‘moments’ that seem charged with intensity and dynamism, Cornelia Baltes invites us into a coherent world where spontaneity and playfulness are balanced with unexpected detail: both meticulous and specific, yet light and effortless.
Born in 1979 in Melbourne, Australia
Lives and works in Paris, France
Ry David Bradley (b. 1979, Australia) graduated with an MFA from Melbourne University in 2013. Bradley is known as one of the artists at the forefront of new artistic theories and practices exploring the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art and society.
Bradley’s process-based practice investigates the nature of painting in an era where the boundaries between picture, video, and virtual reality are increasingly blurred. Technology and nature thereby merge onto the canvas and slowly dissolve onto one another. Painting becomes a product of technology as much as a conscious act from the artist.
Born in 1981 in Germany
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany
«Most of my work is an interpretation of concrete objects or natural patterns that can be studied in real life. I usually startwith research. This first phase is important as I later on usually do not work from photograph or sketch. Rather I try to grasp the systematic essence of things and recreate it in my own way. When the research phase is finished I decide which technique and materials I want to use. Sometimes I work with additive techniques like sculpting with modelling paste and epoxy putty, constructing in wood and steel and sometimes I work with subtractive techniques like carving polystyrene. My approach is to achieve a certain realism without being overly worried about details that are not necessary to transport the essence.»
Born in 1974 in Canada
Lives and works in montreal, Canada
Tammi Campbell’s method for penetrating the male-dominated canon of art history hinges on an enormous amount of research that allows her to technically and truthfully replicate each work. The results of which are perfect stand-ins for their respective originals. Her visible additives, whether bubble wrap, tape, or leaving some element undone, tend to generate both “a-ha” excitement and confusion. A closer look at these paintings show that the protective bubble wrap and tape are in fact an illusion—trompe l’oeil painting taken to its hyperrealistic extreme. The materials, cast completely from acrylic paint medium, suspend viewers in a perpetual state of anticipation and prevent us from entering a true work of art.
Born in 1995 in Paris, France
Lives and works between Paris, France and Lausanne, Switzerland
Salomé Chatriot merges elements of technology with organic parts to create physical and virtual spaces where electronic sculptures and digital images coexist. In her work, physical processes like breathing and heart beating activate mechanical processes, resulting in a symbiosis between human bodies and technological devices. While refusing to embrace a prevailing pessimism about technological progress, she seeks for opportunities to expand our intimate relationships with technologies. In addition, she explores issues of identity, gender and sexuality through a distinctly erotic component, while it also challenges dominant narratives.
Through her hybrid, disturbing yet optimistic artistic language, Chatriot is capable of generating unconventional approaches relating to technological tools.
Born in 1990 in Belgrade, Serbia
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Despite their digital appearance, Maja Djordjevic’s transformative paintings are meticulously crafted with oil and enamel on canvas, devoid of tape, projectors, or special aids. Drawing inspiration from a simple drawing software popular among 1990s kids, she uses it as a visual diary to express herself. Her alter ego, a recurring naked girl in the paintings, serves as a potent conduit for conveying emotions beyond verbal expression. Djordjevic’s narrative centers around the concept of fragility, embracing vulnerability as a natural and acceptable aspect of the human experience. Her art becomes a powerful celebration of female strength and vulnerability, redefining these qualities within the context of contemporary artistic expression.
Born in 1977 in USA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, USA
Influenced by the Dutch Masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and William Kalf, Matthew Hansel’s paintings create worlds of heaven and hell, remixing art styles and exotic ideas from the depths of his unbridled imagination. Universes imagined by Hansel attract and repel in equal measure as they blend amazing oil painting skills with the irrational mind. Letting himself be seduced by his demons, Hansel creates artworks that allow us to safely contemplate things that normally scare or disgust us, like death and monsters, while also considering what is contemporary about these vintage uglies.
The artist’s career began with recreating Dutch master paintings for movie sets, and this experience continues to influence his work as his paintings all act as an homage to art history. Hansel describes himself as a child of the change from an analog to a digital world, and his oeuvre serves as a visual consequence of this development.
Born in 1993 in Germany
Lives and works in United Kingdom
Christopher Hartmann is known for his vivid and detailed oil paintings, which investigate intimacy, emotional attachment, loss, and the complexity of human relationships. He garners inspiration from themes related to romance, and often creates work that addresses boundaries, isolation, and co-dependence. Untitled (2020), for example, shows two men positioned closely together, with the foregrounded figure gazing away from the center of the frame. His companion lays his head on his shoulder, his face partially obscured so that only the bottom half is visible. This work highlights the artist’s interest in moments where “communication falls short.” Hartmann, who holds an MA in Communication Design from Cen tral Saint Martins, has exhibited his work in Tel Aviv, Berlin, and London.
Born in 1960 in United Kingdom
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Alison Jackson, a contemporary, BAFTA and multi award-winning artist, photographer and filmmaker explores the cult of celebrity – an extraordinary phenomenon manufactured by the media, publicity industries and the public figures themselves. Jackson raises questions about how we can’t tell what is real or not anymore, and how we don’t care, in fact we enjoy it. She creates convincingly realistic photographs, films and sculpture depicting celebrities doing things in private, images that we have all imagined but never seen before, using cleverly styled lookalikes. One foot in truth and the other one foot in fantasy. Jackson raises questions about how we think we know celebrities intimately but very few of us have met them for real. Her work is an exploration of our insatiable desire to get personal with public personalities, raising questions, questioning the power and seductive nature of imagery inciting voyeurism and our need to believe – you can’t rely on your perception when it comes to photography. Jackson challenges our preconceptions through imagery. Jackson takes portraits of (real!) famous actors, politicians and celebrities, collected by Museum collections, such as at the National Portrait Gallery, The Parliamentary Art Collection in London and SF MOMA, San Francisco amongst many others.
Born in 1970 in Stockholm, Sweden
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Interested in both high and low brow culture, I play on the notion of the tragicomic in a society that is both civilised and ridiculous. This humorous approach acts as a portal that enables us to explore our more unsavoury emotions. My paintings stay predominantly figurative - the figurative, which is the starting point, at times moves towards abstraction. In my paintings, I am interested in the contrast between flatness and the illusion of three-dimensionality, looking for a composition which is often a double take, highlighting the overlooked in the everyday through the use of colour, mark making, stylisation.
Born in 1975
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
A fascination with fashion, period costumes, footwear and sexuality forms the nucleus of Kwok’s subject matter, the diversity of styles and street fashion of London as well as period films also influence him greatly. Subjects range from explicit male nudes to period portraits and still lifes. Hairstyles and shoes are among his favoured subjects with work often subtly alluding to issues of race, ethnicity, culture, gender and sexual equality.
Born in 1958 in Benalla, Australia
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Simon Linke has been making paintings based on the advertisements in Artforum magazine since 1987. Initially reflecting contemporary concerns about the status of art in a commodity based culture Linke’s work has grown into a complex reflection on the role of memory through a distinction between personal and collective histories and a reflection on how value might be redefined as lying somewhere between the two.
In each painting the image of the source material is transformed by a meticulous reconstruction of the selected advertisement through a richly textured surface created in oil paint. Both expressive and constrained the collision of competing meanings highlights the pragmatic challenges of creativity while asserting the efficacy of its opposite, the fantasy that we can escape the gravitational pull of conventionalised existence.
Born in 1986 in United Kingdom
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
In his work, the London based artist Harrison Pearce (b. 1986, UK) examines the mind-body duality, which has been an enduring problem of modern philosophy of mind. The minimal, sleek, industrially shaped sculptures in Pearce’s kinetic installations and thereto corresponding paintings explore an interplay between mechanical elements and organic forms that navigate the boundary between humanity and artificiality.
Born in 1991 in Manchester, United Kingdom
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Ally Rosenberg (b. 1991, Manchester, UK) lives and works in London. Rosenberg received a BFA from Central St. Martins following with an MSc in cognitive neuroscience at UCL and a residency at Harvard’s neuro-imaging lab. Rosenberg has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally. He recently presented his second solo exhibition with Dio Horia - Muscle Memory. Previous solo shows include ’Long Shadows' at Dio Horia Gallery, and 'On Solid Ground' at Bomb Factory Foundation, London. Rosenberg's participation in group exhibitions, including '2 For 1' at Hypha Studios, London, and 'WINK WINK' at The Whitaker Museum & Gallery, Rossendale, reflects his active presence in the contemporary art scene. He is currently working on his first public commission for the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Born in 1989 in USA
Lives and works in Pittsburg, USA
Devan Shimoyama (b.1989) is a visual artist who works primarily in painting and self-portraiture, with works inspired as much by classical mythology as by the culture of his youth. Through his depictions of the queer black male form, Shimoyama investigates the politics of queer culture while navigating his own personal narratives.
Using a variety of materials and methods, Shimoyama showcases the relationship between celebration and silence in queer culture and sexuality. His compositions are inspired by the work of classical painters such as Caravaggio and Goya, while adding more contemporary expression and sensuality. With the use of a variety of lustrous materials such as jewels, black glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, Shimoyama creates works that capture the beauty and alienation of the Black queer body.
Born in 1972 in Plymouth, United Kingdom
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Benjamin Spiers blends elements of Surrealism, Abstraction, and Cubism in his masterful figurative paintings. As a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, Spiers was tutored by Peter Doig, who inspired him to merge traditional painting techniques with modernist styles of figuration. The Cubist features and Dalíesque distortions of the central figure are typical of Spiers’ experimental and highly detailed paintings. Mutated, elongated, and fractured body parts rendered with masterful evocations of light and shade are hallmarks of his work. Spiers was a finalist for the 6th Manifest International Painting Annual award in 2015.
Born in 1999
Lives and works in London, United Kingdom
Marius Steiger is a London-based Swiss artist who holds a Master’s degree in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. He has been awarded a scholarship from the Patronage Fund for Young Swiss Artists of the Kunsthalle Basel. His work is part of public collections such as the Art Collection of the City of Zurich, the Art Collection of the Canton of Bern and the Swiss National Library. His recent exhibitions include Day, Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway (2024); 1974/2024, Villa Benkemoun, Arles, France; Sun shines, Money falls, Blue Velvet, Zurich, Switzerland (2023); Lust for Life, Incubator, London, United Kingdom (2022). His work has also been shown at international art fairs with a solo presentation at Nada, Miami, USA with Blue Velvet (2024); a solo presentation at Artissima, Turin, Italy with Blue Velvet (2023) and group presentations at Enter, Copenhagen, Denmark with Galleri Opdahl (2024); Market, Stockholm, Sweden with Golsa (2024).
Born in 1994 in Chengdu
Lives and works in Hong-Kong
Liao Wen’s artistic practice includes sculpture, video, and performance. Her humanoid sculptures exude both a sense of primordiality and futurism, teetering on the edge of rules and taboo-breaking. She draws inspiration from puppetry, anthropology of ritual and myth, medicine, art history, and everyday norms. Through provocative language, she attempts to contemplate the social order, technology, and the disciplining of power projected onto the body while simultaneously imagining the possibilities of the future body.
