Issy Wood Intimate ‘Self-Portraits’ Rock National Portrait Gallery in London
The first of its kind, the art world wunderkind opens her personal collection for a 12-piece showcase.
Summary
American-born, British-raised artist and musician has unveiled a new solo, 'Self-Portraits,' at London's National Portrait Gallery
On through February 2027, the exhibition launches the Gallery's new Artist Focus program, dedicated to talents pushing portraiture into new territories
Even in a visual world steeped in digital circulation, a hunger for figurative painting persists. Issy Wood is a British-American artist and musician who has have lifted the profile of a new generation of painters braiding classical and conceptual technique with the strange textures of youth culture today.
Hot off a major exhibition at the Kistefos Museum in Norway, the artist heads home to London for a spotlight at none other than the National Portrait Gallery for her first solo of self-portraits. Wood is the inaugural Artist Focus featuree, a new platform at the Gallery dedicated to voices shaking up the sub-genre, and the show comprises 12 works, seven of which making their public debut.
Wood came to the self-portraits through “a very practical urge” to supply stand-in visuals when a magazine “[threatened] to send a photographer over to my studio,” she explained in a recent interview. She began the series in 2020 and has also lent her brush to the stars; last year, she completed a dreamy cover of Charli xcx, who owns several of Wood’s works, for Vanity Fair’s first art issue in nearly 20 years.
Through Wood’s image in Self-Portraits emerges threads of intimacy, consumer culture, and the complexity of identity, reveling in fragmentation as the truest form of self-representation. The personal is not embodied by what is revealed, but what is obscured, masked, and distorted.
Issy Wood: Self-Portraits is now on view through February 28, 2027.
National Portrait Gallery
St. Martin’s Pl,
London WC2H 0HE,
United Kingdom
