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拍品专文
In Chess / car interior (2020), Issy Wood captures the eeriness of the everyday. Executed on black velvet, the large-scale painting delves into a car through the driver’s window. There are two seats set at different levels of recline and a blurred console between them. The seats’ slick black upholstery contrasts with their pearlescent hems. Patches of chessboard decoration grant them a peculiar liveliness. Wood has often painted suits of armour. Here, her car seats come to resemble armoured humanoids, figures of ominous power. We can see pitch black through the passenger window. It could be a cloudy sky at night, or something more unsettling: a primordial darkness. Wood’s scene is made more uncanny still by its matte texture. The velvet ground grants the painting a gauzy, mysterious softness. In 2020-2021 it was included in Good Clean Fun at the X Museum, Beijing, Wood’s first institutional show in Asia.
Wood is a precocious talent. Born in the United States to British parents but raised in London, she studied at Goldsmiths before enrolling on the prestigious Royal Academy MA course. It was there that her paintings caught the attention of gallerist Vanessa Carlos, who agreed to represent Wood while she studied. Upon graduating in 2018, Wood’s work immediately garnered critical acclaim. She has starred in a solo exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2019) as well as at the X Museum. Her work is held in the collections of other major institutions, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and the Tate, London, which possesses a painting from the same series as Chess / car interior.
Wood’s artistic flair spans disciplines. Alongside her painterly practice, she is also a musician and a writer. She has released several volumes of sharp, aphoristic prose that cast a wry, sometimes scathing eye on her life and the world around her. Her paintings apply this keen sense of observation to the artefacts that humans surround themselves with, such as puffer jackets, dinner services and false nails. They abound with unnerving, almost surrealistic juxtapositions of objects usually seen apart. Wood renders these with a bracing realism redolent of the French naturalist painter Gustave Courbet, and with a penumbral palette reminiscent of the Spanish master Francisco Goya. As critic Barry Schwabsky writes, ‘Her touch might read as tentative at first: Fluttery, smudge-like brushstrokes seem to just gradually coax the depicted volumes and surfaces into existence—but it’s an existence that’s ever so slightly vague and blurry, as if a strong wind could disperse it’ (B. Schwabsky, ‘Issy Wood’, Artforum, April 2020). Chess / car interior stands at an intriguing precipice between material and spectral, an apparition that insists on its physical presence.
Wood is a precocious talent. Born in the United States to British parents but raised in London, she studied at Goldsmiths before enrolling on the prestigious Royal Academy MA course. It was there that her paintings caught the attention of gallerist Vanessa Carlos, who agreed to represent Wood while she studied. Upon graduating in 2018, Wood’s work immediately garnered critical acclaim. She has starred in a solo exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2019) as well as at the X Museum. Her work is held in the collections of other major institutions, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and the Tate, London, which possesses a painting from the same series as Chess / car interior.
Wood’s artistic flair spans disciplines. Alongside her painterly practice, she is also a musician and a writer. She has released several volumes of sharp, aphoristic prose that cast a wry, sometimes scathing eye on her life and the world around her. Her paintings apply this keen sense of observation to the artefacts that humans surround themselves with, such as puffer jackets, dinner services and false nails. They abound with unnerving, almost surrealistic juxtapositions of objects usually seen apart. Wood renders these with a bracing realism redolent of the French naturalist painter Gustave Courbet, and with a penumbral palette reminiscent of the Spanish master Francisco Goya. As critic Barry Schwabsky writes, ‘Her touch might read as tentative at first: Fluttery, smudge-like brushstrokes seem to just gradually coax the depicted volumes and surfaces into existence—but it’s an existence that’s ever so slightly vague and blurry, as if a strong wind could disperse it’ (B. Schwabsky, ‘Issy Wood’, Artforum, April 2020). Chess / car interior stands at an intriguing precipice between material and spectral, an apparition that insists on its physical presence.