Issy Wood, a young rising star in British painting1, has her first French exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. Spread out over sixty paintings and as many personal anecdotes, like a visual diary, this plunge into intimacy blending kitsch and triviality says a lot about the stereotypes of our society.
High-gloss black leather coats, car seats and dental fillings painted in close-up; glittering tin cans, porcelain and silver dishes; armour and skin jackets painted on velvet to striking visual effect… Issy Wood’s painting is as striking for its meticulous, almost tactile quality as for the diversity of motifs she combines in devices often evoking split screens. “I see the paintings on a double velvet panel as ‘rendez-vous amoureux’,” she writes on the label of a 2021 oil on velvet entitled 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 armour and the violence implicit in the act of wearing an animal’s skin makes us question who’s wearing what.“
Proceeding from other unnatural associations, her painting House cooling study (2023) is described as the result of a “photo dump”, “in social networking jargon, a selection of images posted at the same time”, in this case, a light fixture, fancy jelly moulds and a car interior. “I spend my time assembling images for my paintings, and sometimes what I decide to paint is simply what happens to be in my orbit at any given moment.”
Selfies and Photodumping
Hence these impressive series of monumental canvases depicting the collection of sauce boats, soup tureens, plates and other porcelain inherited from her grandmother. Here we find the very contemporary taste for hyperrealism (here devoted to decoy), but even more so something morbid and highly obsessive. Whether she calls them “personal lubricants” or “contemporary fetishes”, the London-based artist “delves into the intimate to detect what lies beneath the reputedly conventional codes of society”, writes Guillaume Houzé 2 in the catalogue preface. He adds: “Behind seemingly banal, innocent and precious objects, Issy Wood depicts the violence of domestic space and the passage of time [in] so many vanities […] alternately ironic and grating.” In her paintings of clocks and selfies, for example, the artist does not hesitate to abuse her own image.
Playing on virilist stereotypes through ultra-sexualised motifs (leather jackets, gleaming car interiors…), Issy Wood also attacks feminine clichés.
- Born in 1993 and trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the artist also writes and composes music.
- President of the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation.
“Issy Wood. Study For No”
Lafayette Anticipations
Till January 7th