It might feel like Issy Wood is staring right back at you, glaring out of every canvas, making hard, uncomfortable, unflinching eye contact. The young British painter is staring at herself, lost in soul-searching rumination. You’ve just walked in at the wrong time.
This display at the National Portrait Gallery – the first in a new series of presentations looking at contemporary artists’ use of portraiture – is Wood’s first big public foray into capturing her own face. She’s painted self-portraits before, but never at this scale, never this big and personal. For years now, her focus has mainly been on external stimuli: Diet Coke cans, antiques, clocks, ceramics, leather coats.
The stuff of midnight doomscrolling, obsessive research, fetishistic desire. Seeing her close-cropped, soft-focus approach to everyday ephemera over the years has been like spying on someone’s internet tabs, peeking into the diary of a bored, sad, overtired, caffeine-wired young overachiever. She never really needed to paint her face because her work was always so obviously personal and diaristic.
But she’s done it anyway, and the results are tense and heightened. She’s taken the same close-cropped, fuzzy, angular compositional approach, but now it’s all skin and lips and tears. She sips a Diet Coke while doing a goopy, wet face mask in one enormous painting, squidges her cheek against a mirror in another, doubling her twisted reflection.
She bleeds from her cheek and eyebrow in some smaller works, leans forlornly against her guitar in others. One painting catches her mid-sob, blurry-eyed and disconsolate. Every painting here is her looking back at herself, lost in navel-gazing, self-pitying introspection.
Two pictures of her as a kid are full of smiles and giggles, but they just make you realise how miserable the rest of the images are, and how miserable she must be. And that’s not a bad thing in art terms (but probably not great on a personal level) because it makes for some really good paintings. They’re weird, suffocating, intimate things, like you’ve been allowed into her weakest moments, like you’re interrupting her mid-weep.
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