National Portrait Gallery, London
These close-cropped paintings seem to capture our own bored, glum and perpetually online lives – yet there’s humour and silliness, too, in among the masks
It might feel like Issy Wood is staring right back at you, glaring out of every canvas, making hard, uncomfortable, unflinching eye contact. But she’s not. The young British painter is staring at herself, lost in soul-searching rumination. You’ve just walked in at the wrong time.
This display at the National Portrait Gallery – the first in a new series of presentations looking at contemporary artists’ use of portraiture – is Wood’s first big public foray into capturing her own face. She’s painted self-portraits before, but never at this scale, never this big and personal. For years now, her focus has mainly been on external stimuli: Diet Coke cans, antiques, clocks, ceramics, leather coats. The stuff of midnight doomscrolling, obsessive research, fetishistic desire. Seeing her close-cropped, soft-focus approach to everyday ephemera over the years has been like spying on someone’s internet tabs, peeking into the diary of a bored, sad, overtired, caffeine-wired young overachiever.