Magic Bullet

Artists

Issy Wood

Press release

In fall 2025, the Schinkel Pavillon will present “Magic Bullet” – the first large-scale solo exhibition in Germany by British artist Issy Wood (b. 1993). A new series of works will be on view that respond to the striking architecture of the site. Issy Wood captures our world with her tempting paintings–on canvas, on music instruments or furniture covered in shiny velvet–based on her astute observation of objects, events and the human mind. Her distinguished, old-masterly painting fluctuate between realism and surrealism, a pictorial form that is as uncomfortable as it is seductive and which the New York art critic Barry Schwabsky described as “perverse realism.” Despite, or because of, her anachronism in technology and subject matter, Wood seismographically records the sentiment of her generation in such a unique way. Her hyper-modern visual language stems from her iPhone, but she also draws on antiquated sources such as estate catalogs or stills from forgotten film classics. Obscure fetishes of the commodity world, old-fashioned and fashionable luxury goods, and archaic totems are imbued with allusions and personal experiences and, like her blog confessions, oscillate between disclosure and concealment. Objects and surfaces function as surrogates for the untouchable fears and desires of the inner and outer worlds, which clash harshly in her staggered images. An adjacent essay was commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition of Issy Wood: A Throw of the Dice by Margaret Kross. Excerpt: Rich with illusion, skeptical of absolutes (“Reality is very that couples therapy idea—what he says and what she says and the truth,” Issy Wood quips), the exhibition’s central gambit is a roll of the dice or numbered orbs suspended midair. Throughout her work, viewers must negotiate partial truths and performative gestures, sometimes encountering paintings on sexy black guitars and speakers arranged like the Sotheby’s auction display of a washed-up rockstar’s estate. Maybe there is a “magic bullet” after all: an ego death of sorts, the kind that can explode the whole game by taking the hand off the trigger and refusing to play.