A rising star of British painting, Issy Wood is being honored with his first French exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. Presented in 60 paintings and as many personal anecdotes, like a visual diary, this plunge into intimacy, blending kitsch and triviality, speaks volumes about the stereotypes of our society.
Ultra-glossy black leather coat, like those car seats or dental fillings painted in close-up; tin cans, porcelain and a silver dish gleaming; armor and a leather jacket painted on velvet with a striking visual effect…
Issy Wood's painting is striking as much for its meticulousness and almost tactile quality as for the diversity of motifs she combines in arrangements often reminiscent of split screens. "I see the paintings on a double velvet panel as 'romantic encounters,'" she writes on the label of a 2021 oil on velvet titled Steed Energy, adding: "Here, the femininity associated with the cowhide jacket and the machismo associated with the knight's breastplate become blurred. The subtle entanglement of the armor and the implicit violence contained in the act of wearing an animal's skin make us question who is wearing what."
© Courtesy of the artist, Carlos Ishikawa, London and Michael Werner, New York / Photo: Damian Griffiths
A rising star of British painting, Issy Wood is being honored with his first French exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. Presented in 60 paintings and as many personal anecdotes, like a visual diary, this plunge into intimacy, blending kitsch and triviality, speaks volumes about the stereotypes of our society.
Ultra-glossy black leather coat, like those car seats or dental fillings painted in close-up; tin cans, porcelain and a silver dish gleaming; armor and a leather jacket painted on velvet with a striking visual effect…
Issy Wood's painting is striking as much for its meticulousness and almost tactile quality as for the diversity of motifs she combines in arrangements often reminiscent of split screens. "I see the paintings on a double velvet panel as 'romantic encounters,'" she writes on the label of a 2021 oil on velvet titled Steed Energy, adding: "Here, the femininity associated with the cowhide jacket and the machismo associated with the knight's breastplate become blurred. The subtle entanglement of the armor and the implicit violence contained in the act of wearing an animal's skin make us question who is wearing what."
© Courtesy of the artist, Carlos Ishikawa, London and Michael Werner
New York / Photo: Damian Griffiths
SELFIES AND PHOTO DUMPING
From this emerged these impressive series of monumental canvases depicting the collection of gravy boats, tureens, plates, and other porcelain inherited from her grandmother. Here, we find the very contemporary taste for hyperrealism (here applied to illusion), but even more so, something morbid and deeply obsessive. "Personal whims" or "contemporary fetishes"? The London-based artist "delves herself into the intimate to uncover what lies hidden beneath the supposedly conventional codes of society," writes Guillaume Houzé in the catalogue preface. He adds: "Behind seemingly banal, innocent, and precious objects, Issy Wood portrays the violence of domestic space and the passage of time [in] so many vanitas paintings […] by turns ironic and jarring."
Like her paintings of clocks or selfies, where the artist doesn't hesitate to challenge her own image, Issy Wood plays with virile stereotypes through ultra-sexualized motifs (leather jackets, gleaming car interiors, etc.), thus also attacks feminine clichés.
1 Born in 1993 and trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the artist also devotes herself to writing and musical composition.
2 President of the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation.
"ISSY WOOD. STUDY FOR NO"
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