Issy Wood at the National Portrait Gallery: self-portrait as construction
London’s National Portrait Gallery is showing eleven recent self-portraits by Issy Wood to launch Artist Focus, its new strand for contemporary portraiture. The display shows how closely painting can examine the face as a place of choices, restraint and staged identity.
Wood’s self-portrait series began from a practical need and grew over several years out of phone selfies. The British-American painter treats her own face not as a candid record, but as something to be worked on, adjusted and sometimes obscured, with each image balancing exposure and control.
For painters and drawing enthusiasts, the interest lies in the way Wood turns a familiar subject into an exercise in looking. Each work involves a chain of decisions about pose, expression, distance and what should remain withheld, so the series becomes less a confession than a study in how images of the self are made.
Her visual language draws on Renoir’s pearly period, the collages of Hannah Höch and John Stezaker, and the look of advertising, fashion, pornography and social media. That mix gives the work an uneasy pull: the face is never just a face, but a surface shaped by competing visual codes.
Placed at the National Portrait Gallery, the works enter a longer history of portraiture while also testing what the genre can still do now. For artists, that is the key point: Wood shows that self-portraiture can remain inventive, self-aware and alert to the way looking is always mediated.
Source : The Art Newspaper