Issy Wood

Issy Wood was born in 1993 in Durham, North Carolina, and grew up to become, by her own account, a painter, writer, and musician who moved to the United Kingdom for her education. She earned a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2015, and went on to postgraduate study at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where she is documented as a student from 2015 to 2018 and from which she graduated in 2018. (One gallery biography instead cites the Royal College of Art for her postgraduate training; the Royal Academy's own artist page, together with Sotheby's biography, corroborates the Royal Academy Schools, which this profile treats as the better-supported account.)

Carlos/Ishikawa in London has been a core gallery partner throughout her career, alongside Michael Werner Gallery, which presented her New York solo show, Time Sensitive, in 2022. Her practice extends beyond painting into music and writing, and she has described her paintings as functioning like a diary, tracking daily preoccupations through recurring images of cars, medical devices, fur, and ornate domestic objects rendered in a dense, oil-on-velvet-like surface.

Her exhibition history broadened quickly over the following years: a solo show at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London in 2019, further exhibitions in Beijing, New York, and Vienna, and a major solo exhibition, Study For No, at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris in 2023 to 2024. In 2025 the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin presented her solo exhibition Magic Bullet, and in 2026 the Kistefos Museum in Norway staged Fish, Fish, Duck, her first solo exhibition in the Nordic region. She lives and works in London.

Critical writing on Wood consistently returns to the way her paintings blur the line between the personal and the commercial, using found and remembered imagery, luxury cars, medical scans, silverware, celebrity faces, as a kind of visual diary rather than straightforward still life. Lafayette Anticipations has described her painting practice in exactly these terms, framing her recurring objects as carriers of history and social pressure rather than neutral subjects, a reading echoed across gallery and museum texts. Institutions have moved quickly to validate that reading, with solo presentations at Lafayette Anticipations, the Ilmin Museum of Art, the Schinkel Pavillon, and the Kistefos Museum arriving within a few years of one another.

Wood's auction record stands at GBP 441,000 for the painting Cries Real Tears!, sold at Phillips London in 2022. MutualArt separately reports a USD high of 587,484 for her paintings, consistent with this figure once converted, though the exact sale date is not confirmed in public sources. That result remains, as of this writing, her highest recorded auction price, ahead of two other Phillips results, Actual car 2 at USD 254,000 and Eggplant / car interior at USD 215,900, for which exact sale dates are likewise not publicly documented. Her primary market runs through Carlos/Ishikawa in London and Michael Werner Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, and her rapid institutional exhibition schedule through 2025 and 2026 has coincided with sustained secondary-market attention. No repeat-sale or long-run pricing analysis was available to corroborate a trend line, so collectors should treat any single auction result as a data point rather than a settled trajectory.

Wood is a living, actively exhibiting artist with no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authentication run through her two primary galleries, Carlos/Ishikawa and Michael Werner Gallery, rather than through a published scholarly catalogue. Her market is young: a single, well-documented auction record from 2022 anchors current price expectations, but the overall base of public sales is still small relative to her rapidly expanding exhibition record. Collectors should weigh her strong and accelerating institutional program, several major museum solo shows since 2023, against the thinness of long-run auction data when assessing where her prices may be headed.