Dark and lush oil tones painted on stretched velvet bring this anthropomorphized car interior into hazy focus in Issy Wood’s Study for goes both ways. Typifying her practice, the present work sees Wood ingeniously blend classical pictorial modes with modern subjects and sensibilities in a style she coins “medieval millennial.” Drawing from old auction catalogues, family heirlooms and her personal life, her muted palette and implicit allusions to the body are reminiscent of seventeenth century Dutch still life paintings and suggestive of Surrealist anxieties, but she contemporizes these tropes. Her association with this rich tradition is well acknowledged, having emerged onto the scene in 2017 with her inclusion in White Cube’s acclaimed Dreamers Awake exhibition in London. The imagery, however, is purely Wood’s own. Estranged body parts, leather jackets and car interiors pervade her oeuvre in what writer and editor Rosanna Mclaughlin described in terms particular appropriate for Study for goes both ways as an “intoxicating interplay of desire, luxury and degradation.” (Rosanna Mclaughlin, ‘Issy Wood,’ Mixing it Up: Painting Today, (exh. cat.), London, Hayward Gallery, 2021, p. 112) In the five years since her exhibition at White Cube, Wood has shown in institutions worldwide, her works included in the collections of major museums such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. She is also a successful musician who produces under Mark Ronson’s label Zelig Records with several singles and EPs available on streaming services.

Employing her signature closely cropped and magnified perspective to depict two contrasting car interiors, Wood toys with duality and the power of juxtaposition, much as the Surrealists of the 1930s used collage to generate intriguing connections between disparate elements as a way of accessing the unconscious. Two sets of chairs facing opposing directions bisect the painting in a mysterious face-off that calls to mind the work’s title, Study for goes both ways. By allowing the chairs to fill the entirety of the painting, they become the scene’s principals in absence of the people the viewer expects to see occupying them. Wood therefore casts the chairs as characters in an elusive narrative. At such a close angle they are detached from their larger context, becoming alien, ceasing to add up to a whole. Like a word spoken repeatedly until it is only a cacophony of sounds devoid of any meaning, Study for goes both ways disassembles into a jigsaw of prints and textures. This recalls the intricate close-ups of Domenico Gnoli, but Wood further complicates our interaction with the picture plane by her unique choice of medium.

Velvet has been historically associated with prestige and opulence, but mass production and shifting tastes have seen the luxurious medium slip into kitsch. Expropriating velvet for her own means, Wood delights in the cognitive confusion resulting from painting the likeness of one fabric onto the surface of another, and in the challenge of doing so. Describing her choice, Wood shares they “were a sort of joke with myself about painting, alluding to painting a fabric on a different fabric […] or even painting a velvet jacket on velvet – it has an uncanniness to it […] and I guess it’s fun to take my murky palette and meet that crazy shininess halfway. It’s fun on the velvet to deal with white.” (Issy Wood in conversation with Sarah McCrory, Luncheon, No. 8., 2019 (online)) Like Meret Oppenheim’s famed Object or Eva Hesse’s celebrated Accession II, Wood engages the viewer’s sensitivity to the tactility of an objects while highlighting her mastery with the medium in an outcome that both unsettles and amazes.

In the present work, Wood replicates velour – an outdated material commonly used for car upholstery in the 70s and 80s. Parallel to her fascination with “catalogues of objects that for whatever reason aren’t really seen except for during a two-hour afternoon day sale, [going] from one private hand to another private hand,” Wood captures a defunct fad that swept through America in the 1970s. (Ibid.) As with the extraordinary lots shown in auction catalogues, a car has intrinsic value and is commonly seen in flashy advertisements that showcase it as an object of desire. Wood, however, presents these as dusty relics of a time past – the chairs long since abandoned.

Artist

Issy Wood