Issy Wood

Borrowing its title from a 2019 painting, the exhibition unfolds around the notion of refusal and resistance, explored through the artist's obsession with intimacy, interiority, care, desire, femininity, relationships, and identity. 

An observer of the contemporary world, Wood's work casts both an amused and disconcerted gaze on the power dynamics that rule over it. The characters and scenes she depicts unfold as allegories of the power games that govern our ways of living, which she explores through series of paintings of hypersexualized leather jackets, gleaming car interiors, immaculate porcelain services, singular portraits of domestic animals, invasive dental examinations, and a multitude of self-portraits. Hyperproductive, Issy Wood approaches her painting practice as a form of diary, which she accompanies with daily writing and music composition that altogether form an intimate portrait of the artist.

Her work stands out as rejecting a certain order expressing an uneasiness in the face of the systems of oppression — both conscious and unconscious — which control beings, and make some vulnerable. The exhibition Study For No looks at how refusal is heard or ignored, while calling “to learn the power of using the word ‘no.’

In partnership with Libération, M Le Magazine du Monde and The New York Times

Credit: Issy Wood, Study for No, 2019 Peinture à l’huile sur lin © Issy Wood 2023, courtesy of the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, Londres ; Michael Werner, New York and private collection, London
Photo: Stephen James