“In 2020 my world contracted, like everybody else’s. I haven’t seen or felt or gone anywhere new – no museums, no bodies, no clothes or frivolity. I’ve been watching TV shows and films on my computer (its 13-inch screen is about the size of my world right now).”

— Issy Wood

A captivating aspect of Issy Wood’s art is her acute sensibility in conveying the subtleties of reality underneath the glamorous surfaces of her paintings. Describing herself as a ‘Medieval Millennial’, the London-based artist brings forth a stance of classical solemnity yet lands in a critical examination of our ever-changing contemporary lives. ⁱ Created in 2020, the present lot Professional Help on Rye is perhaps one of the most compelling exemplars of this more realist facet in Wood’s work, in which she attempts to capture a particular experience of alienation during the global pandemic. In light of massive lockdowns and forced quarantines that reshaped her engagement with the material world, the Gen-Z artist turned to nostalgic TV shows from her millennial memories—as she enumerated, ‘The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Coen brothers movies’—all of which served as ‘unashamedly wistful’ reminders of the recent yet distant days when ‘people did, at one point, touch each other and eat together and be in rooms.’ ⁱⁱ

Based on snapshots from these entertaining episodes that she has extracted, Wood has created a body of work addressing her everyday negotiation with a sense of dislocation at this moment in time. An example of this, Professional Help on Rye features a female figure with curly blonde hair having her rye bread, which easily evokes scenes of the female protagonist Carrie chilling out with friends at Magnolia Bakery in Sex and the City. With a nuanced handling of scale, Wood transforms the appropriated slices into psychological dramas. At an ambitious larger-than-life size (measuring over 180 centimetres tall and 240 centimetres long), the composition zooms sharply into an extreme close-up of her hands holding the piece of bread. This dissonance in perspective not only maximises the defamiliarising effect that has characterised Wood’s art, but also metaphorises our misplaced positionality amid tremendous changes.

While this extreme close-up engenders unsettling proximity, Wood carefully maintains a mysterious air by deliberately cropping out the protagonist’s face. Whether her expression conveys ignorance or obsession remains unreadable, inducing the viewer’s own psychological projection. Filling the corners and edges are luxurious objects, including an antique animal figurine, a pair of hammers, silver chains, and a heart-shaped golden lock. In the artist’s own words, they are ‘souvenirs’ from her pre-COVID artmaking. ⁱⁱⁱ That Wood extracts these motifs of rarities largely from auction catalogues points to the more complex mechanism of fetishism. The exquisite items and expensive tokens are objectified forms that secure the intangible desire and power through the means of physical property accumulation. Ironically, the flood of material allure overwhelming her canvas here becomes only mediated illusions of our deprived connection with physical things, signifying instead a state of insecurity at the specific moment of uncertainty.

Focusing sharply on the act of eating, Professional Help on Rye also rhymes with Wood’s ongoing effort to distil from her routine activities the theme of food as both a symbol and problem of desire, as seen in her recent exhibition What I Eat in A Day concluded on 25 January at TANK Shanghai. Adopting a diaristic form with small-scale compositions, Wood articulated a narrative in which supplements, vitamins, milk and sandwiches are juxtaposed with fur coats, silk shirts, high heels, pearl earrings and leather handbags. Like these material goods, food epitomises the dangerous pleasure of consumerism yet speaks to a more intimate and internal experience operating directly upon our biological mechanics. Within this critical vein, Professional Help on Rye raises questions about the psychological implications of this ordinary daily act: will it bring satisfaction or result in insanity? Can it fulfil our never-ending appetite or trigger further addiction to material allure?

Intriguingly, Wood employs a highly stylised syntax of the uncanny to dissect the complex vortex of desire hidden in everyday banality. As she has put it, ‘I’m convinced the way I configure these otherwise alluring products and garments often lowers them, literally, in tone, or happily switches them from being an advert to an expression of perversion, in the way painting can do.’ Examining Professional Help on Rye closely, one notices occasionally unfinished renderings that reveal the subjective construct behind Wood’s photorealistic portrayal. In creating a ghostly understatement of the painted objects, Wood further probes into a pictorial lineage following the Dutch Golden Age genre of pronkstilleven, which explored representations of material abundance to reveal the transience of life. Like artists such as Clara Peeters, Wood creates opulent phantasms that ooze resplendence yet impermanence, acting as a reminder that not everything is as it seems. Food, in particular, has been explored in this tradition as a signifier of momento mori—in its ephemeral freshness and inevitable obsolescence. Professional Help on Rye engages precisely with this art-historical subtext, shedding light on the essential vanity lurking beneath gustatory pleasures.

Following What I Eat in A Day at TANK Shanghai, Wood’s current solo exhibition Wet Reckless is on view at Michael Werner Gallery in Los Angeles through 17 May 2025. In the coming fall, sponsored by LEAP Art Foundation, Wood will present a collection of new works at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin as part of her first solo exhibition with the institution. Wood is currently represented by Michael Werner Gallery and Carlos/Ishikawa. 

ⁱ Issy Wood, quoted in Artsy artist page, online
ⁱⁱ Issy Wood, quoted in Carlo/Ishikawa’s Instagram, 18 June 2021, online 

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.