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Lot Essay
In Issy Wood’s The Consultation (2017), past and present collide. Glistening manicured nails, painted in gleaming metallic polish, curl around an antique floral plate. Though the beholder is absent from the frame, their gaze is palpable in the work’s intricate painterly detail, where the dance of light and shadow seem to coax the plate’s leaves and petals into life. Neither the hand nor its treasure is quite of this world, each bathed in a lustrous silvery sheen that brightens and fades as the viewer’s eye moves across the picture plane. Included in White Cube’s 2017 exhibition Dreamers Awake—a celebration of female Surrealists and their legacy—the work is a thrilling large-scale example of Wood’s engagement with history and material culture. The artist draws inspiration from auction catalogues and objects in her family home, cropping her subjects to the point of abstraction and pairing them with unmistakable signs of contemporary life. This approach has propelled her to critical acclaim in recent years: in 2021 she mounted a major solo exhibition at the X Museum, Beijing, as well as featuring in the Hayward Gallery’s group exhibition Mixing it Up: Painting Today.
Wood was born in America but studied in London, attending Goldsmiths before completing her MA at the Royal Academy Schools in 2018. A writer and musician as well as an artist—her second EP If It’s Any Constellation was released on Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records last year—her work moves seamlessly between different worlds. While studying at the Royal Academy, she would frequently visit auction houses, collecting catalogues and perusing their glossy imagery. She was fascinated by way in which lost gems would resurface for the briefest of moments, enshrined in high-definition photography and shining displays before disappearing back into private collections. It was, she felt, a dynamic that resonated with contemporary social media, where images and thoughts are broadcast and dissolved in the blink of an eye. Wood began to think about her own family’s belongings, looking to silverware, tureens and other objects owned by her maternal grandmother. The present work is suffused with a sense of longing and intrigue, its shimmering painterly surface alive with nostalgic desire. The title—The Consultation—seems to conjure a valuation or examination; the plate, in turn, seems to dissolve under the weight of scrutiny.
By choosing subjects seemingly rooted in bygone ages, Wood seeks to close our distance from the past. Art history, she believes, is a rich resource for understanding our proximity to our ancestors, its archives filled with emotions, glances and expressions that—in many cases—demonstrate how little humans have changed over the centuries. Though people are conspicuously absent from her work—their bodies supplanted by the material relics of their existence—Wood seeks to collapse time through other means. The present work is filled with references to past painterly styles: from the prismatic lighting effects of the Impressionists and the Pointillists, to the immaculate graphic detailing of Domenico Gnoli, to the strange juxtapositions of the Surrealists. While the hand that cradles the object is clearly of the present, the stance itself is one of timeless resonance. The Consultation offers a comforting truth: that the act of looking at objects, and of looking at art, is filled with the same magic as ever it was.
Wood was born in America but studied in London, attending Goldsmiths before completing her MA at the Royal Academy Schools in 2018. A writer and musician as well as an artist—her second EP If It’s Any Constellation was released on Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records last year—her work moves seamlessly between different worlds. While studying at the Royal Academy, she would frequently visit auction houses, collecting catalogues and perusing their glossy imagery. She was fascinated by way in which lost gems would resurface for the briefest of moments, enshrined in high-definition photography and shining displays before disappearing back into private collections. It was, she felt, a dynamic that resonated with contemporary social media, where images and thoughts are broadcast and dissolved in the blink of an eye. Wood began to think about her own family’s belongings, looking to silverware, tureens and other objects owned by her maternal grandmother. The present work is suffused with a sense of longing and intrigue, its shimmering painterly surface alive with nostalgic desire. The title—The Consultation—seems to conjure a valuation or examination; the plate, in turn, seems to dissolve under the weight of scrutiny.
By choosing subjects seemingly rooted in bygone ages, Wood seeks to close our distance from the past. Art history, she believes, is a rich resource for understanding our proximity to our ancestors, its archives filled with emotions, glances and expressions that—in many cases—demonstrate how little humans have changed over the centuries. Though people are conspicuously absent from her work—their bodies supplanted by the material relics of their existence—Wood seeks to collapse time through other means. The present work is filled with references to past painterly styles: from the prismatic lighting effects of the Impressionists and the Pointillists, to the immaculate graphic detailing of Domenico Gnoli, to the strange juxtapositions of the Surrealists. While the hand that cradles the object is clearly of the present, the stance itself is one of timeless resonance. The Consultation offers a comforting truth: that the act of looking at objects, and of looking at art, is filled with the same magic as ever it was.