Executed on lush, stretched velvet in rich oils, Eggplant / car interior sees London-based interdisciplinary artist and rising star Issy Wood pushing a Surrealist syntax of the uncanny into the 21st century. Her investigations of consciousness and the commodity coupled with her distinctive aesthetic have led her work to be oft-described as “medieval millennial.”i Wood’s paintings have a unique ability to intrigue and unsettle, thanks in part to her large-scale closely cropped compositions and innovative use of materials. Taking the smallest everyday detail, Wood’s large-scale work makes the familiar strange, detaching the innocuous car interior from its usual context and repositioning it in unexpected new combinations. Suffused with humor and eroticism, Wood’s work recalls the crisp close-ups of Domenico Gnoli’s everyday objects, more recently reinvigorated in Julie Curtiss’ precise brand of Neo-Surrealism.
Auto Erotica
Taken originally from the pages of car sales catalogues, Wood’s series of car interiors plays with the idea of the automobile as at once the image of suburban banality and of aspirational consumerism. A desirable but dangerous object, the car, as J.G. Ballad explored most famously in his 1973 novel Crash, also sits at the charged interface of violence and desire, the frisson of which is clearly communicated in the shapely, suggestive forms and richly textured surface of Eggplant / car interior.
Drawing attention to the dated vocabulary labelling cars as female objects owned by men, Wood playfully presents the gearstick and surround in unmistakably sexual terms. Emphasizing its smooth curves and polished finish, Wood’s closely cropped image inverts this association, instead poking fun at the metaphoric relationship between cars and masculine virility. As her title suggests, detaching an object from its usual set of relations opens it up to a remarkable slipperiness, as Man Ray had explored with his assisted readymades Homme and Femme.
“She's good at layering everyday objects with something extraordinary, making her work quite funny and also recognizable”
—Michal Xufu HuangVelvets
Meticulously painted on stretched velvet, Wood shows an especially attuned sensitivity to our relationship with materials and the tactility of objects, manipulating our expectations to wonderfully disconcerting effects. While our mind registers the smooth, cool effect of leather seats and the dull hardness of the veneered car interior, we instead stumble over the chunky, thick textures of oil on velvet, creating a visual and sensorial dissonance that is particularly affecting.
Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich Like supreme Surrealist Meret Oppenheim’s famously unsettling fur-covered teacup, Object, part of what gives Wood’s Eggplant / car interior its power to estrange is its tactility, and the sensory confusion we experience when looking at a familiar, everyday object made strange in this manner. Knowing teacups as we do, we can’t help but imagine touching, lifting, and drinking from this fur-lined cup, an unsettling and almost abject challenge to what we think we know of the order of things. Similarly, the proximity of the familiar object and human or animal characteristics explored by both Oppenheim and Wood generates a decidedly uncanny atmosphere, humorously posing questions about what it means to be objectified, and how value is attributed in our consumer-driven society.
“Both painting and producing music deal with layers, scrapping the parts you don’t want, and happy accidents.”
—Issy WoodMusic video for Issy Wood’s "Fuss," 2021
i Naomi Rea, “‘They’re very similar attitudes’: Artist Issy Wood on her double life as a paintings sensation and ascendent pop star,” Artnet News, November 20, 2020, online
Provenance
Carlos∕Ishikawa, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above)
Phillips, London, October 15, 2021, lot 6
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
309
Eggplant / car interior
signed and dated "Issy Wood 2019" on the reverse
oil on velvet
43 3/8 x 59 1/8 in. (110.2 x 150.2 cm)
Executed in 2019.
Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000
Sold for $215,900
Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com
Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session
New York Auction 20 November 2024
368
This lot is no longer available.
370
This lot is no longer available.
