Issy Wood’s paintings have a way of making the ordinary feel faintly threatening. American-born but based in London since her university years, Wood builds a body of work that pulls from surrealism but lands somewhere much stranger and more personal — a visual language built out of the objects she inherited from her maternal grandmother, including decades-old auction catalogues. She’s called herself a “mediaeval millennial,” a description that gets at something real about her practice: modern anxieties rendered with a classical, almost devotional seriousness. Consumerism, the performance of heritage, the slow decay that follows every living thing — these are the undercurrents running through nearly everything she paints, delivered with a dry, acerbic edge that keeps the work from ever tipping into sentimentality.
Wood studied fine art and art history at Goldsmiths, graduating in 2015, before completing an MA at the Royal Academy Schools in 2018. Since then, her work has shown at White Cube in London, Mendes Wood DM in Brussels, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and Tate St Ives. In 2019 alone, she unveiled a series of miniature oil portraits of Joan Rivers and installed over a thousand hand-painted floor tiles for the Zabludowicz Collection’s World Receivers exhibition, while also mounting her largest solo show to date, All the Rage, at Goldsmiths CCA. Her first solo exhibition with JTT in New York, daughterproof, opened the following January.
The Asp in Clasp (2018) is a fairly precise distillation of what makes her work unsettling. A watch strap coils in on itself with an almost muscular tension, curling into something that reads less like an accessory and more like a snake mid-strike — and at its center, where a clockface should sit, a human face stares out instead, half-formed and slightly melted, as if time itself had started to dissolve into flesh. Thin trails of grey smoke drift through the composition, pulling the image toward dream logic rather than anything representational. The palette does a lot of the work here too — a narrow range of blues and greys that gives the whole painting a dull metallic shimmer, the kind of tone that belongs less to daylight than to whatever sits just behind sleep.