Issy Wood turns phone selfies into paintings in London show
Eleven paintings of the same person have gone on show in London. All are self-portraits by Issy Wood, and all show Issy Wood.
The show is called Issy Wood: Self-Portraits. It opened on 9 October 2026 in the Weston Wing of the National Portrait Gallery in London and runs until 28 February 2027, according to Artsy. Wood is the first artist chosen for the gallery's new Artist Focus strand. The strand is devoted to living artists who are expanding and challenging portraiture, the art of making pictures of people.
Wood is a British-American painter born in 1993. She also works as a musician and writer. The London display is the first and largest show to date devoted to her self-portraiture, the gallery says.
The eleven works come from a much larger run. Wood has painted more than 80 self-portraits over the past five years, working from selfies taken on her camera phone, The Art Newspaper reported. The series began in 2020.
It started for a practical reason. Wood told the paper that a magazine writing about her planned to send a photographer to her studio, so she offered to supply a painted image of herself instead. She kept painting herself long after that deadline passed.
She is clear about what the pictures are not. They are "not candid snapshots" of her at all, she said, but "the most consensual of all images" of her. Each one takes a few days to make. The group includes Self portrait 22, made in 2022.
Three works by Wood are now in the gallery's collection. The gallery says it is the only national institution to hold one of her self-portraits in its collection, according to the National Portrait Gallery. That holding was announced when the gallery launched the new contemporary programme.
What makes this stand out for a visitor is the contrast in method. The starting point is familiar to anyone with a phone. A quick selfie. The finish took days of studio work.
For fans arriving with no background, a self-portrait means the artist is both painter and sitter. Here the sitter was always available. The London room brings eleven stops from that five-year habit together in one place.
