Issy Wood: Self-Portraits review – suffocatingly revealing works from the ultimate zillennial painter

Eddy Frankel | The Guardian | 16th October 2026

Wood, a young artist and “market darling” has a small selection of her works on show at London’s Portrait Gallery. They are all self-portraits and are characteristically “tense”, large format, tightly cropped compositions of her face. In some she wears a mask, presenting the complexity of “contemporary identity”. Her art, says the writer, is that of “the bored, the medicated, the perpetually online, the depressed overachiever … she’s not just good, she’s quietly important.”