The National Portrait Gallery is turning its attention firmly towards the present with Artist Focus, a new contemporary programme dedicated to artists who continue to experiment. Launching in the Weston Wing during Frieze Week, with the first dedicated presentation of Issy Wood’s self-portraits, the programme will bring three free exhibitions to the Gallery each year, creating space for artists to open questions about portraiture.
The inaugural exhibition, Issy Wood: Self-Portraits, opens on 9 October 2026 and runs until 28 February 2027, bringing together 11 intimate paintings, seven of which have never previously been exhibited publicly. It is the largest presentation devoted to Wood’s self-portraiture to date.
Born in North Carolina in 1993, the British-American artist has developed a practice that moves between intimacy and alienation, desire and consumption, the personal and the mediated. Her paintings draw on the visual language of contemporary life, from personal archives and social media to advertising, auction catalogues and popular culture, transforming familiar images into something psychologically charged and often unsettling.
The self-portrait series, begun in 2020, offers one of the most personal strands of Wood’s practice. Yet these are far from straightforward portraits. Through tightly cropped compositions, obscured faces and layers of distortion and masking, Wood plays with the tension between visibility and concealment. The self is present, but never entirely available.
That sense of controlled revelation is central to the work. What appears to be an intimate encounter becomes something more elusive: a portrait shaped as much by what Wood withholds as by what she reveals. For Wood, the paintings can function almost as substitutes for photographs of herself, the painted image standing in for the real.
For the National Portrait Gallery, Artist Focus signals a broader engagement with contemporary approaches to portraiture. The programme looks at how artists are reshaping it in response to a world increasingly defined by images, self-presentation and mediated identities. Free to visit, the programme will feature three presentations in the Weston Wing each year.
Wood is a fitting place to begin. Her paintings sit at the intersection of the deeply personal and the relentlessly visual culture that surrounds us, turning the familiar act of looking at a face into something stranger, more ambiguous and psychologically revealing. Her recent Lafayette Anticipations show in Paris a few years ago, was a success.
