Issy Wood, the painter of hidden desires... and one of our personal favourites
- 21 hours ago
- 5 min read
Born in 1993 in the United States, Issy Wood is a British painter and musician who lives and works in London. Educated at Goldsmiths (BA in 2015) and the Royal Academy Schools (MA in 2018), Wood emerged in the late 2010s as one of the most distinctive young figurative painters working in the UK.Â
At just 33 years old, she has already single-handedly crafted a new figurative aesthetic that blends classical techniques with representations of contemporary objects. Working across painting, writing, and music, she represents a generation of artists for whom artistic identity is not confined to a single medium. But Issy Wood is best known for her tightly cropped figurative paintings depicting everyday objects — leather car interiors, porcelain tableware, clothing, or household items — rendered with meticulous attention to surface and texture. Upon looking at her work, one can quickly grasp that the artist is truly fascinated by materials. So much so, that she sometimes paints on velvet, giving her works a shimmering quality as their surfaces interact with light in a distinct manner. More recently, the artist took this process one step further by directly painting on furniture.
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Issy Wood frequently draws imagery from personal archives and digital sources, including photographs and screen-based imagery, reinforcing the sense that, far from being solely diaristic, her work operates at the intersection of private memory and mediated experience. Her interest in objects, for instance, partly derives from a longstanding fascination with collecting and auction catalogues — sources that inform both the iconography and compositions of her works. The painter often isolates fragments of bodies or objects, creating images that feel both intimate and estranged, as personal details from her life coexist with an impersonal detachment. Displaying a stream-of-consciousness type of visual language, her paintings have thus often and have been compared to digital moodboards: fragmentary, diaristic, and structured around visual associations rather than narrative coherence.
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Rather than depicting dramatic scenes or recognizable narratives, Wood constructs images in which emotion is embedded in surfaces—leather, porcelain, velvet, skin—, producing a form of painting that reflects the texture of contemporary life. Her paintings suggest that in a culture saturated with images and commodities, identity may be constructed less through events than through the objects that surround us. Issy Wood's canvases are thus firmly rooted in the pop art tradition, while renewing the genre through a darker, more surreal universe. Black is omnipresent in her works, often coexisting with brighter, more sensual colors like vermilion, dark green, or royal blue. And through her recent subversion of second-hand furniture and clothing, on which she paints, the artist fetishizes these decaying objects with suttle irony.
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But the objects depicted by Wood function as psychological proxies rather than neutral still-life subjects. Indeed, behind apparently ordinary motifs, Wood explores themes such as desire, refusal, interiority, and self-reflection. The artist's fascination with materials like leather and velvet, and her attraction to rare and luxurious objects, evoke a world of fantasy and eroticism. In doing so, she flatters the viewer's taste in what might be considered unspeakable desires. Themes of gender and power also implicitly recur throughout Wood’s practice. Critics, for instance, have often noted her interest in how femininity can be expressed through objects traditionally coded as masculine, such as automobiles or luxury goods. Her work questions the relationships between bodies and commodities, suggesting how social expectations shape both desire and identity. This tension is frequently reinforced by an atmosphere of irony or unease, in which attractive surfaces coexist with psychological discomfort.
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But even when setting aside this conceptual aspect of her work, the paintings themselves are simply visually striking, thanks to Wood’s powerful technique. Indeed, not unlike some of the best old masters—think of the fabrics worn by Velázquez’s royal figures, for instance—, she knows how to render light precisely whilst visually stripping down materials to their essential features.
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Wood’s broader practice includes writing, music and video-making, all of which share the confessional tone that characterizes her painting. On top of that, she has maintained an impressive degree of independence within both the art and music industries, choosing to also release work outside major commercial structures. Wood even famously turned down Larry Gagosian’s offer to represent her in 2020, asking him what would happen to his gallery after his death… To this day, she is thus still represented by her historic gallery Carlos/Ishikawa—although she is also on Michael Werner Gallery’s roster since 2022. For all these reasons, we are big fans of Issy Wood at US Advisory. But, after three years of downturn for ultra-contemporary art, does her current market reflect the same sentiment from our peers across the board? Â
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Like most emerging artists of the time, Wood experienced a period of intense market enthusiasm during the post-pandemic boom, with major paintings achieving between €350,000 and €500,000 after fees at auction in 2021 and 2022. Works such as Chalet (€532,108 at Phillips in 2022), Study for goes both ways (€475,716 at Sotheby's in 2022), and Actual Car 2 (€456,526 at Phillips, 2022) established her among the strongest-performing young painters of her generation. Interestingly, her second all-time record at auctions (€484,861 fees included) was achieved by her painting Kinkstarter at Sotheby's in late 2023, when the market downturn had already been hitting hard for almost a year. Since then, however, Issy Wood’s paintings have also undergone price corrections at auction—several works reappearing at significantly lower levels. Actual Car 2, for instance, sold again for €233,591 in May 2024. Likewise, Eggplant / Car Interior declined from €388,647 including fees at Phillips in October 2021 to €204,993 including fees in November 2024, while Miami / From Shame to Grace fell from €262,024 including fees at Christie's in November 2021 to €176,492 including fees two years later.
Yet Wood's market has remained relatively liquid. Recent works continue to trade regularly through Phillips, Christie's and Sotheby's, generally within or above estimate ranges, with major paintings still achieving between €120,000 and €200,000 hammer. Rather than collapsing altogether, her market appears to have undergone a repricing process while preserving an active collector base. Demand also remains strong on the primary market, where the artist's works continue to be highly sought after and the best works extremely difficult to acquire. At a time when many speculative contemporary markets have virtually disappeared from the auction circuit, this capacity to sustain both transaction volume and six-figure prices suggests a level of depth that may prove decisive over the long term. The relative resilience of Wood's market over the past three years thus makes her appear better positioned than many of her contemporaries to withstand the ongoing contraction of the ultra-contemporary art.
On top of that, her work continues to be the subject of international exhibitions: in recent years, the artist has been shown in major institutions, such as Aspen Art Museum and Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (in 2023 and 2024), or TANK Shanghai (2024). More recently, in 2025, her paintings were the subject of a show titled Magic Bullet at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin. And a major institutional retrospective of her work is currently on display at Kistefos Museum in Norway, until 11 October 2026. Her works are also held in major collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or the National Portrait Gallery and Tate in London.
