“What does ‘from life’ even mean in this day and age?”
—Issy Wood

Untitled (Harley’s foot thing) offers up a super-zoomed, flip-flopped foot in the viewer’s face. Issy Wood’s 2021 painting is undeniably eerie, from the enormous size of the long toes, with their squared, sickly-yellow pedicure, to the greyish tone of the subject’s skin. Wood’s tightly cropped canvas cuts off the overlapping feet at their edges—only one toe of the right foot is visible, and the left foot crops off below the ankle. Even the edge of the big toe is cleanly shorn away. In Wood’s hands, a benign body part becomes alien, unusual; even, to quote Barry Schwabsky, “perverted.”ⁱ 

 

Such zoomed-in, claustrophobically-cropped compositions are the signature to Wood’s “perverted realism,” which, as Schwabsky explains, “draws on traditional, even ostentatiously conventional representational styles in order to estrange them.”ⁱⁱ Despite the close-up on the sitter’s feet, there is indeed a sense of estrangement from the painted body in Untitled (Harley’s foot thing), as if it is more object than living flesh. The foot is a thing in the title, after all. Such sterile disassociation perhaps connects to the artist’s childhood—raised by doctors, “everything I thought was objective about the body as a kid later revealed itself to be entirely subjective.”ⁱⁱⁱ Wood has also candidly spoken of her experience receiving treatment for eating disorders and body dysmorphia as a teen and young adult, mental illnesses that often involve a dissociative, distorted relationship to one’s own body.^iv

 

The crop and angle of Wood’s composition in Untitled (Harley’s foot thing) suggests the deep perspective of a webcam, inviting interpretation of the unknown Harley’s foot thing as a foot fetish. The plaid background pattern, too, adds to the lascivious uncertainty, perhaps signifying a man’s flannel shirt, or a bedsheet, and the glimmer of an anklet at top right seems to winkingly confirm our suspicions. That said, the tight crop of the canvas withholds any further details from the viewer, and Wood’s fluttering brushstrokes further the dissociative sense; however close the feet may seem, they are separated from us by a screen of paint, tantalizingly untouchable. Wood relishes such creepiness in her work: “a lot of my subject matter is chosen for its promise of the pristine, and I’ve assigned myself the task of showing how this promise is broken almost every time,” she says.^v

 

The NSFW internet aesthetic of Untitled (Harley’s foot thing) suits the artist, who was discovered by her gallerist, Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa, as much for her painting as for her quippy, confessional Tumblr blog.^vi Wood declares that “I refuse to beat myself up for using the Internet to work in the oldest medium in the world,” oil paint, especially when the Internet is rich with the partial truths and broken promises that inspire her work.^vii Untitled (Harley’s foot thing) is the painterly expression of Wood’s wider oeuvre, which also includes music and writing. Painting is “the sturdiest venture” of the three, Wood says, but it is still tenuous, transient and impermanent as the human body.^viii Wood’s perverted realism, as Schwabsky writes, records the richness of the human experience, that however deeply felt, is still “ever so slightly vague and blurry, as if a strong wind could disperse it.”^ix

 

Music video for Wood’s 2021 song, “Muscle.”

 

 Collectors’ Digest

 

• Phillips holds the auction record for Wood, with Actual car 2, 2019, from last May’s New York Evening Sale.

• Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Tate Modern, London; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, among others.

• The London-based Wood made her New York solo debut with Issy Wood: Time Sensitive, at Michael Werner Gallery, Sep. 9 – Nov. 19, 2022. The artist’s next show, Issy Wood: Furni, opens at Carlos/Ishikawa, London, on May 12, 2023, where it runs through June 24^th.

 

 

ⁱ Barry Schwabsky, “Barry Schwabsky on Issy Wood,” Artforum, Apr. 2020, online.

ⁱⁱ Ibid.

ⁱⁱⁱ Issy Wood, quoted in “Meet the Artist: Why Issy Wood’s week beats your year,” Artspace, Apr. 17, 2023, online.

^iv Wood, quoted in Joe Coscarelli, “Issy Wood Met Power Players in Art and Music. She Went Her Own Way,” The New York Times, Sep. 9, 2022, online; Wood, quoted in Philomena Epps, “Issy Wood Talks Painting the Tragedy and Ambivalence Lurking in Luxury,” Garage, Mar. 18, 2019, online.

^v Wood, quoted in “Meet the Artist.”

^vi Coscarelli.

^vii Wood, quoted in “Picture Books: Ottessa Moshfegh and Issy Wood,” Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2021, online.

^viii Wood, quoted in “Meet the Artist.”

^ix Schwabsky.