This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2025 special issue of Monopol Magazine.
Issy Wood cleans the floor with big men. Take uberproducer and DJ Mark Ronson. He signed her just one year after she began making music, but she dropped him in the middle of the pandemic. She similarly turned down uber-gallerist Larry Gagosian, asking him who would manage her career after he died. When she locked herself in the bathroom to get away from his disappointment, he sent her a text message saying, »the other galleries you are considering will go out of business long before my demise.« Gagosian was probably wrong. Now in her early 30s, Wood is one of the most successful and expensive artists of her generation. This Berlin Art Week, Schinkel Pavillon is showing her first solo exhibition in Germany, ›Magic Bullet‹.
The British-American painter, musician, author, and blogger oscillates between total control and utter loss of control in art as in life, which is one marked by psychological problems, depression, and bulimia. U.S. critic Barry Schwabsky has described her painting as perverse realism. Everything is rotting: teeth, hair, decaf cola cans, interiors, self-portraits, and internet images.
Wood has described herself as a medieval millennial and paints on second-hand furniture and velvet, elegantly exposing decay, loss, and futility in order to fetishize them—naturally not without irony. Her paintings throw together a joystick, porcelain lambs and cherub piggy banks tossed onto a front seat, fittings, and fake leather to make a ›Fucking joyride‹. This still life oozes sexual violence and ennui, just like the title of her penultimate album, ›My Body Your Choice‹—or perhaps that’s just a regressive joke.
Inscrutable Wood does not allow herself to be photographed and is said not to sell her self-portraits. Shy and complicated painters such as Victor Man and Jana Euler have shown how it’s done. This hermetic, secretive, controlling approach is at home in top galleries, with an apparent scorn of the market and the industry only serving to make the artists more appealing.
Wood does this more elegantly, forcefully, and (the seriousness of her images notwithstanding) more flamboyantly—words that also describe her exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon. Bringing together painting, painted musical instruments (piano, drums, guitar, bass, music stands, etc.) and a sound installation, it’s bound to hit the mark once again. Kill your daddies!
›Issy Wood: Magic Bullet‹, Schinkel Pavillon, 11 SEP 2025—31 JAN 2026
Credits for images: Or so I’ve heard, 2022; Speeding / losing my touch, 2022; 20mph, 2023; Look Ma, no cavities, 2023; Installation View: Furni, Carlos/Ishikawa, London © Issy Wood 2024, courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Michael Werner Gallery, New York. Photography by Damian Griffiths