Issy Wood Art for Sale and Sold Prices

b. 1993 -

Wood’s paintings find comfort in the uncomfortable, and vice versa. Uncannily familiar yet entirely strange, they are both painterly in an impressionist style and subtle imposters in their anachronism. Depicting contemporary ephemera such as mobile phones and car interiors, she impulsively renders apparently unconnected subject matter on lush velvet or discarded items of clothing, mimicking the non-sequiturs of social media. These works indicate an obsessive relationship to commodities, both treasured and discarded, inherited or stolen, gathered from the pages of auction catalogues, or snapshots from her on and offline surroundings.

Palpable throughout the work is Wood’s negotiation of her personal life through her relationship to objects and figures, such as Joan Rivers’ auctioned jewellery and Rivers herself, which she invests with fetishistic and sometimes tragic symbolism. The patterns of thematic repetition in her body of work perform a pathological, even medical, excavation; or perhaps an attempt to exorcise their seductive appeal, treading the fine line between advert and pervert.

The resulting vision is a mournful one, rendered in a muted palette, and compositionally disquieting, with implausible perspectives, crushed distances and a certain claustrophobia – we never see a sky line or a full body. Here and there, faces might emerge from inert forms, or incongruous objects jar in the pictorial frame, lacing Wood’s work with a neurotic and hallucinogenic humour.