Featuring three presentations each year, Artist Focus invites contemporary artists to explore portraiture's evolving role in art, society, and culture.
This first presentation, Issy Wood: Self-Portraits showcases intimate self-portraits by British American artist Issy Wood (b. 1993). An artist, musician and writer, Wood examines intimacy, desire, consumer culture, and the complexities of contemporary identity in her varied output. Started in 2020, this series of self-portraits forms a particularly intimate side of her practice. Marked by her humour and distinctive approach to cropping and framing, these works carefully negotiate the appearance or concealment of the self through layers of distortion and masking. For the artist, self-portraits often function as substitutes for photographs of herself – the painted image standing in place of the real. Artist Focus is made possible with the support of the Gallery’s new Contemporary Council.