Over the past three years, through art fairs, auctions, global pandemics and album releases, British painter and musician Issie Wood has perfected her professional pursuits.
Chosen as the next big thing by collectors, curators and cultural giants from two different worlds, 29-year-old Wood took a bizarre ride on his own hype cycle after briefly indulging in the hype. , most often refused it. She leaves some fancy bridges smoldering behind her.
An in-demand visual artist and DIY singer, Wood is uncomfortable with the very different demands of potential pop fame. After unfolding a saga with two patrons in business, creativity and friendship, Wood is resurfacing with new boundaries. Art dealer Larry Gagosian and music super-producer Mark Ronson, best known for his work with Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga.
Instead of Gagosian, the fine gallery empire that may have been Wood’s defender, a new exhibition of her disturbing figurative paintings, “Time Sensitive,” opens Friday at Michael Warner, a more traditional Upper East Side gallery. opened. And rather than release her debut album on Ronson’s Zelig label (Sony Music’s label with which she temporarily signed a record deal), she teetered and acrimoniously after her contract dissolved last month. “My Body Your Choice” was released entirely independently.
“If I wanted an older man with money on his head, I would have kept in touch with my father,” Wood said last week, at the cavernous Soho apartment where the new gallery had hers, seltzer and Capri. said dryly while drinking cigarettes. for the show.
Part self-proclaimed naive and part openly savvy steer, she identifies as “tough” and “extremely sensitive,” recounting recent ups and downs across the industry, both mode.
Of Gagosian, 77, Wood said: i love how you are,” only flipped a switch when she decided not to work with him. “Then there is the line it becomes. why is it so hard ” (Through a representative, Gagosian declined to comment.)
upon “parts,” On an almost playful kiss-off from her new album, Wood touches on a dynamic similar to Ronson’s, but it applies to others as well. “I’m not just a newbie/I have a problem with you not being able to pronounce.”
Vanessa Carlos, founder of Carlos/Ishikawa, a gallery in London where Wood has been exhibiting since his art school days, believes that this rare combination of emotional vulnerability and strategic, astute intelligence is what makes Wood work. He said that it makes it possible to connect across multiple mediums.
“Issy is really, really resistant to being commoditized or objectified,” Carlos said. “Sometimes she can be seduced by glitter, but she can quickly see through her things. Her main compass is her attitude towards herself and her work.” is the sincerity of
Made entirely alone at the kitchen table, “My Body Your Choice” features “a heartbreaking song about a real-life boyfriend, a heartbreaking song about my father no longer being in my life, the music It blends “heartbreak songs about working for a label”.
Like her figurative paintings, explained As “an atypical look at objects we think we know their shape,” her electronic pop sounds almost familiar, but can crunch and swell in unexpected ways. I have.
“Embarrassingly, I make what I consider to be pop music, but people describe it as unstable,” said Wood. “But I did my best! why is it unstable? That’s all — it’s me trying to be normal and failing miserably.
Linking these two tasks is semi-public blog It’s something Wood has kept since he was 14 years old. Evolving from her frustrated teenage abstraction on her Tumblr musings to a raw and searing diary analyzing her life and career, the writing of which is regularly written by Carlos/Ishikawa It has been edited and released in book form. (Example sarcasm: “Having his 76-year-old man angry tell me how you feel is his new ASMR.” Or, after a failed relationship, “Men are It’s still a waste of moisturizer.”)
“It’s all one thing,” said dealer Gordon Veneklasen, owner of the Michael Werner Gallery, of Wood’s various projects. He said, “She has enough energy to make everything a major part of the job.”
Born in Durham, North Carolina, to doctor parents and raised in south London, Wood spent most of her adolescence “in hospitals and psychiatrists because of an eating disorder,” she said. “Art school was the only way out for me,” she said.
At the 2016 Royal Academy, Wood was poached by Carlos. Carlos was as drawn to the artist’s Tumblr as she was to her paintings. but, Art Basel Miami Beach 2018, a large-scale oil rendering of a car interior painted on velvet, brought her into the young artist’s class, whose sales market and share of attention exploded in tandem. This year, one of her paintings surpassed her $500,000 at auction.
Wood did his best to ignore the noise, but there was a lot of it. Most days, after meditation and her two morning smokes, she paints during her normal working hours in her London studio, taking breaks to chat with Carlos in the gallery next to her. increase.
“We’re at the mercy of the current madness where people seem to despair of my work, and the crazy, frankly abusive behavior from collectors, advisors who want their cuts, and people who put my work up for auction.” “Wealthy people don’t like being told no — most of them are men, and they especially hate being told no by women. It hurts everything they’ve tried to achieve.”
Music that should be a place of rest flows at night. Wood messed around with the band as a teenager, but returned to songwriting in 2019 after their breakup. “Art became my job,” she said. “Music became a hobby, almost like a secret.” Later, a friend of hers offered to send Ronson some of Wood’s early demos at a party.
“I knew him as a guy who put a lot of horns on things,” said Wood.
Producers soon visited her in London. this could be really big’” she recalled, and began renting out her equipment, which Wood took as a creative challenge. She didn’t know Ronson had a record label until he offered to sign her, and didn’t realize it meant her deal with Sony as her corporate partner, she said. Told.
“I thought it was going to be like joining a gallery, just a handshake, and then you’re on to things,” Wood said. On his advice, she hired a lawyer.
Accustomed to the 50/50 split in the art world, Wood was taken aback by the biased terms of a typical major-label recording deal. “I feel like I got to that record deal in the strongest possible way – a little older, a little wiser. “And I had a very lucrative career, so I didn’t need to get much out of them.”
Yet, through the rocky release of two Pandemic EPs with Zelig (she called Zony), Wood found the requirements of her new job to be mentally taxing and borderline absurd. The label, she said, was worried about being sued over her video and album artwork and set her up with a social media manager trying to teach her about hashtags. (“I know she was born in 1993. I know exactly what a hashtag is.”)
Ronson was lavishly able to provide feedback on her music, but found it difficult to identify him with questions. Due to Covid, she never met anyone else involved in her music career, including the manager Ronson helped hire her.
The emotional and physical distance turned into animosity, leading to a disrespectful end to the pairing. “That he won an Oscar for songwriting and that I didn’t.” , I hope she does her best and continues to use my HBO Max login.”)
Her breakup with Gagosian after an extended game of cat-and-mouse had a “similar taste,” she said.after i do everything for you …” Wood made a parody and slammed his fist on the table.
She recalled upsetting her dealer when she questioned who would lead her career when the last business meeting passed. After Wood retreated to the bathroom to escape Gagosian’s dejected disappointment, Gagosian texted her, “The other gallery you are considering will go out of business long before my death.” , accidentally sent it three times, but the tension eased. She then wrote more about the episode.
Things were calmer this week with Michael Werner. When Wood and her new gallerist Veneclasen tried to arrange the painting, Wood compared the sweet and awkward negotiations to having sex with someone for the first time. “what do you like?”
The art under review included a textbook-sized depiction of a contraceptive container and an enlarged clipping of “Mad Men” the size of a small pool. Wood’s main instinct was subtraction. But even with parties, sales, reviews, and perhaps even more music looming, the focus was again on work.