LONDON.- Today, the National Portrait Gallery launches a new contemporary programme, Artist Focus, offering a vital platform for artists expanding and challenging the genre of portraiture. The Gallery is delighted to announce Issy Wood as the first artist showcased as part of this new programme, which will offer fresh perspectives on how identity, representation, and human experience are understood through portraiture today.

Featuring three presentations in the Gallery’s Weston Wing each year, Artist Focus – which is free to access – reinforces the Gallery's commitment to championing contemporary artistic practice, while fostering new conversations around portraiture's evolving role in art, society, and culture. Global in remit, the inaugural presentation will include twelve portraits by the American-born British artist, Issy Wood, who has gained international attention for her painting practice, which includes her boundary-pushing approach to self-portraiture.

Born in North Carolina in 1993, Issy Wood is a British painter whose psychologically charged works examine intimacy, desire, consumer culture, and the complexities of contemporary identity. Working primarily in painting, Wood’s practice draws upon imagery sourced from personal archives, social media, auction catalogues, advertisements and popular culture, creating compositions that blur the boundaries between portraiture, still life, and psychological narrative.

Issy Wood: Self-Portraits is the first and largest display devoted to Wood's self-portraiture to date. Begun in 2020, this series forms a particularly intimate side of her practice. Marked by her distinctive approach to cropping and framing, these works carefully regulate the appearance or concealment of the self through layers of distortion and masking. For the artist, these paintings often function as substitutes for photographs of herself - the painted image standing in place of the real. With three works now in the NPG’s Collection, the Gallery is the only national institution to call itself home to an Issy Wood self-portrait. Wood’s presentation in the NPG’s Weston Wing will include one of these Collection works, Self portrait 2 (2021), displayed alongside 11 paintings from her personal collection. The presentation will also include some of the artist’s most recent self-portraits, with 7 of the portraits having never been exhibited publicly before.





The programme will be made possible with the support of the Gallery’s new Contemporary Council. The Gallery is deeply grateful to Founding members who include The Bukhman Foundation, Cingilli Collection, The Firebird Collection, Jane Chao Lee, Christian Levett and Musee FAMM Mougins, Ryan Taylor Collection, Lady Ina Sarikhani Weston and those who wish to remain anonymous.

“The Gallery’s history has always been one of innovation. We were the first portrait gallery in the world when we were founded in 1856 and remain the global centre for the study and appreciation of portraiture today. As the home of portraiture, the NPG is best placed to be a venue and a platform for continued experimentation, as we work to inspire future generations by showcasing the work of trailblazing artists.” -- Dr Flavia Frigeri, Chief Curator, National Portrait Gallery

Issy Wood (b. 1993, North Carolina) studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy of Art in London. Her work has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions worldwide, including most recently at Kistefos, Norway; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; TANK Shanghai; Aspen Art Museum; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; and Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul. Her work is in the collections of numerous prestigious institutions in addition to The National Portrait Gallery, London, including the Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sharjah Art Foundation and Tate, London. Wood lives and works in London