by Mia Butter // Sept. 26, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Weird.
In her first large-scale solo show in Germany, Issy Wood proudly features a small portrait of a pretzel and a few Mercedes she dubs “mid-life crisis cars.” The Schinkel Pavillon hosts 22 works by the British artist under the title ‘Magic Bullet’—ranging from painting to installation, and featuring a new audio piece made for the occasion. A self-described “medieval millennial”—born in 1993 and painting anachronistic motifs from before her time—Wood guides us towards shame via shamelessness. More millennial than medieval, her work embodies the gall and crippling insecurity combination that we love, and love to hate, in an artist. The magic bullet in the title refers to the medical wonder and human ideal of targeting the bad without harming the good: it reflects the ultimate pursuit of precision and control, even when things get weird.
Issy Wood: ‘Ice cream (You specifically),’ 2025, oil on linen, 140 x 100 x 5 cm // Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa
Ripping off images from catalogues and her own iPhone archive, traditional painting themes such as dogs, teeth and hands repeat throughout the show. There’s another motif that finds its way into several works: dice. ‘Magic Bullet’ reflects Wood’s (and our own) incessant need for control in the face of uncertainty and chance. A 20-sided die, a six-sided die—they’re everywhere, like an omen, and if it’s not dice then it’s charms of religious symbols and wishbones, or keepsakes and tchotchkes. What can’t be contained by spirituality or fortuity is tightened into submission by braces, weighed down by chains or sealed in porcelain, like the cutesy, smiling creature in ‘Lobotomy goals study.’
Issy Wood: ‘Slouching towards the maxillofacial unit,’ 2018, oil on linen, 100 × 140 × 4.5 cm // Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa
What feels like bizarre choices of imagery can mostly be traced back to Wood’s biography. Publicly sharing a type of poetic diary online via her blog committothedish, the artist doesn’t shy away from oversharing, and the accompanying exhibition text by Margaret Kross follows suit. An astute description of the show stands out among the fluff: “The artist’s fixation with footwear, muscle pain, crash diets and bingeable food: all symptoms of bargaining with time’s authority and American capitalism’s promise of a chance for instant change if you’re worthy of survival.”
Issy Wood: ‘Lobotomy goals study,’ 2025, oil on linen, 92.5 x 92.5 x 5 cm // Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa
Painting anatomically correct muscles and digestive organs feels again like a kind of wrestling with fate, an attempt to exert control over the uncontrollable, the bodily. Even though both of Wood’s parents are doctors, this fact feels like a diving board propelling the artist into a pool of obsession over the body, rather than a simple reasoning behind why she paints this way. The weirdness present in the works is very much her own, and the free rein she gives her mind often results in something surreal. Or does she just have an exceptional grasp on the absurdity of our contemporary reality? Nothing Wood paints is made up, per se, just recontextualized. What makes her work “weird” stems more from our own discomfort with her shameless truth. She just chews up and regurgitates the world around us, serving it up to us to digest in whatever way we can.
Issy Wood: ‘The (amazing) back,’ 2025, oil on linen, 120 x 255.5 x 5 cm // Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa
With an overwhelming amount of imagery swirling around the pavilion, the sheer number of works in the show feels excessive. There’s expectation placed on the works to “respond to the striking architecture of the site.” So were the hexagons in ‘Toast/blouse’ supposed to reference the pavilion’s octagonal shape? I didn’t see the connection, and I don’t think the show needed that edge. The only work that really “responded” to the space was the installation upstairs and its accompanying audio track. As if painting on velvet didn’t possess enough of an uncanny tactile quality, Wood here approaches musical instruments, equipment and furniture with her brush, dabbing and dragging paint across the wooden, pleather, plastic, metal and, again, velvet surfaces.
Issy Wood: ‘Toast / blouse,’ 2024, oil on linen, 162 x 212 x 5 cm // Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa
Taking up the second floor of the pavilion, the instruments in ‘MUS1C’ are displayed like a “Sotheby’s auction display for a washed-up rockstar’s estate,” as Kross describes it in the exhibition text. When walking up the stairs, you hear the installation before you see it. The 17-minute audio piece ‘SCHINKEL.WAV’ is a playful cacophony of suddenly charming and then jarring phone conversations, voice notes to be listened to “as a podcast” and piano compositions. Much like her paintings, Wood’s audio work acts as a jumbled collage of imagery, solidified by a Louis C.K. and Joan Rivers scene from the show ‘Louie’ that made my toes curl, but in the way I think it was intended to. Like the pretzel in ‘Untitled (Dietetix),’ the late Rivers is used by Wood as a symbol for her struggles with Bulimia, as the two both suffered from the eating disorder. And food, or its digestion, is referenced again in the estrangement of the human body through a painting of the digestive tract on the body of a guitar. Every work oozes melancholy, romanticism, violence and an unbridled life force that battles an eerie stillness present in the works. Like if Sylvia Plath could paint.
Issy Wood: ‘Magic Bullet,’ 2025 // Photo by Frank Sperling, courtesy of Schinkel Pavillon
This sentiment spans Wood’s work as a musician, blogger, painter and beyond, all of which co-exist as one practice. Her blog posts from the pandemic are like absurd reflections of the (admittedly absurd) world and her more recent posts are more poetry than documentation. In fact, they grapple with Wood’s self-image more than anything. Reading that she doesn’t sell her self-portraits—whether it’s true or not—feels very on brand. This refusal, bonded with a certain abjectness in the work, is what seems to seal her standing in the contemporary art scene.
Issy Wood: ‘EU 42,’ 2025, oil on linen, 90 x 246.5 x 5 cm // Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa
Is the weirdness here supposed to reflect true, deep feelings? Is it supposed to elicit strong emotions? I feel sad for the lamb-shaped piggy bank, tossed on its side, its bottom hole agape in ‘Fucking Joyride’ and then I’m almost immediately assessing the wearability of the green kitten heels in ‘EU 42.’ When surrounded by Wood’s paintings, this emotional whiplash, characterized by an alarming numbness, is something you can’t shake. Her works are strange because they call out bits of the shame, desire and perversion that we might forcefully reject, but Wood seems to know better than most how futile the attempt to resist it is. Prolific and productive, Wood created a body of work here that by its sheer amount reflects a certain fastidiousness. Describing her self-imposed, gruelling schedule as an artist, I find her quoting a friend in an old interview who told her to “start caring about silly things like quality of life.” Seeking a middle ground between a fixation on control and the inevitability of chance in life, might just be the magic bullet we’re all after.
Schinkel Pavillon
Issy Wood: ‘Magic Bullet’
Exhibition: Sept. 11, 2025–Jan. 31, 2026
schinkelpavillon.de
Oberwallstraße 1, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
