You can almost hear a soft voice say ‘and how does that make you feel?’ as you walk around Issy Wood’s new show. The brilliant young painter has filled the gallery with sofas and uncomfortably close self-portraits. It’s like you’ve walked in on her therapy session and can’t figure out how to leave without making it all more awkward.
The sofas are covered in images of locks and chains, porcelain dolls and Diet Coke cans. You can’t sit on them, so you have to wander tensely around the room like an unwelcome guest, looking at these close crops of her face. She’s puffy eyed and weeping, half submerged in a bath, blowing smoke, staring dead eyed into the distance. The two huge canvases show her in a slick gooey Korean face mask and the thick green slime of some cucumber, mud and avocado peel. They’re massive, confrontational and knowingly mundane, like she’s elevating self-care and boredom to biblical, historical levels. Is she making some grand comment on beauty standards and the makeup industry? I doubt it.
Wood has become one of the most interesting young painters around, and is increasingly imitated. And as usual with her, on a basic level, they’re just really good paintings; soft focus, grainy, mediaeval-looking visions of millennial life. But where her older work felt like sifting through a million open tabs, doom scrolling her whole life, this is rawer and more personal. It’s just her, staring out at you, tired, blasé, callous and emotional.
I like some of these paintings more than others, even though bits of the show feel precision engineered to be sold to rich bozos so they can scream ‘don’t sit on my Issy Wood!’ at their maids. At it’s best, this feels like the art of abject, total boredom, of ennui melting into self-obliteration, like she’s locked in an SSRI-fog where everything is still real, it’s just that none of it matters. If anything, it's just a little too relatable.
