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In a seductive black-on-black, Issy Wood paints a vintage convertible with the tactile allure characteristic of her “intoxicating interplay of desire, luxury and degradation.”i Extracting her source material from online auction archives and catalogues, her grandmother’s heirlooms and her own photographs, the London-based artist transforms images of cars, leather jackets, armor and porcelain with an uncanny sensibility. In Actual car 2, 2019, Wood paints an aerial view of the 1950s Mercedes Benz 300 SL that differs from traditional catalogue photographs, presenting an all-encompassing aerial view of the car that accentuates its curves. Showcasing Wood’s signature technique of painting on velvet, the present work exemplifies the artist’s investigations on the relationships between consciousness and commodity, masculinity and femininity, and glamor and tragedy.
“So you can't climb Everest, you can't have Monroe, and you're not likely ever to ride a rocket to the moon. But you can, if you're properly heeled, achieve an experience that's in the same ultimate class—you can get yourself a Mercedes-Benz 300SL. And if you really respond to machinery, the effect is the same.”
—Griff Borgeson, Sports Cars Illustrated, April 1956In her car works, Wood weaves notions of gender and desire that permeate her work by playing with the slippery distinctions between object and objectification. While the artist’s paintings of leather jackets “represent a kind of woman," she explains that she "[thinks] of the cars as quite a masculine environment.” Wood continues, “the car is an escape for a man, it’s where one can experience a kind of freedom—or at least that’s how advertising sells a car...It’s fun to try that on for size, to see what it would be like to be a man for whom this is a desirable object.”ii By painting a car, Wood inevitably engages with its role as a status symbol and metaphor for a sort of conquering, with mastery over machine being comparable to athletic and romantic feats. Wood further addresses this notion of desire in her writings, where she quotes Roland Barthes’ statement in her observation of the hallowed and erotic aura that surrounds sports cars in modern culture. In Actual car 2, the convertible is presented like a divine object as the interplay of light and shadow sensually highlights its body.
“Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
—Roland BarthesActual car 2 rhymes with the 300 SL’s historical place as the first supercar and first sportscar to feature luxury refinements on par with its technical capabilities, highlighting the intentional appeal of the exterior. The 300 SL Coupé was uncoincidentally also depicted by Andy Warhol in 1986—a work that went on to win him a commission by the automaker that became his unfinished Cars series. The Cars works play up the glamour and commercial appeal of the machines in contrast to the cars featured in his earlier Saturday Disaster works. Wood’s work occupies an impressive middle ground; not simply highlighting the car’s commercial status or questioning the spectacle of automobile crashes, it lingers in the car’s in the sultry, oblique appeal.
Andy Warhol, Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Coupé (1954), 1986, Mercedes-Benz Art Collection. Artwork: © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In a 2019 interview, the artist revealed that works such as Actual car 2 mark a new development in her car series by making the color of her subject the same as that of the respective velvet support. By painting directly on velvet, Wood at once explores the visual and tactile through her painterly process, revealing the power of materiality to convey mood and meaning. Here, the rich black velvet and matched palette engenders the dark and eerie tenor pervading the composition, evoking the black-hole silence of the background and barren seats. In the Western art historical canon, velvet paintings originated as a sanctified medium reserved for portraying religious icons and, by the 20th century, became kitsch statements of anti-art eventually elevated into the realm of “high art” by artists such as Julian Schnabel. The present work thus situates itself within the charged history of the velvet medium as Max Hollein observed, while also alluding to a timeless fabric that—like modern luxury cars—symbolize power, desire, and wealth. In this way, Actual car 2 captures the striking dialogue between representation and materiality, past and present, with which Wood engages in expressing the “seductive artificiality” and “angst” of glamor.iiii Rosanna Mclaughlin, “Issy Wood,” Mixing it Up: Painting Today, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2021, p. 1121
ii Issy Wood, quoted in “Issy Wood in Conversation with Sarah McCrory,” Luncheon, no. 8, 2019, p. 61
iii Philomena Epps and Issy Wood, quoted in “Issy Wood Talks Painting the Tragedy and Ambivalence Lurking in Luxury,” Garage, March 18, 2019, online
來源
倫敦 Carlos/Ishikawa 畫廊
洛杉磯 John Wolf Fine Art 畫廊 (購自上述來源)
私人收藏（購自上述來源)
紐約，富藝斯，2022 年 5 月 18 日，拍品編號20
現藏者購自上述拍賣
330
《實際車輛 2》
款識：Issy Wood 2019（內框）
油彩 絨布
60 7/8 x 43 3/8 英吋 (154.6 x 110.2 公分)
2019年作
估價
$150,000 - 200,000
成交價$254,000
Patrizia Koenig
日間拍賣（下午部分）拍賣主管暨專家
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com
現代及當代藝術日間拍賣(下午部分)
紐約拍賣 2024年5月15日
366
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380
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400
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403
此拍品已不再提供買賣。
