Issy Wooden’s “Charli 2” (2025), commissioned by Vainness Truthful as the duvet for the upcoming artwork subject publishing this November. Wooden’s portrait each references and enhances Aidan Zamiri’s photographs of Charli XCX for the singer’s October cowl story with the journal. (picture courtesy Issy Wooden/Vainness Truthful)
“I don’t really get to decide when [brat]’s over or not,” Charli XCX advised Contributing Editor Anna Peele throughout an prolonged interview for Vainness Truthful‘s cover story this month — “I think that’s as much as the world.” If VF has a say, brat (2024) and the profession evolution it has imposed on the singer and producer are nonetheless related over a yr later, particularly because the journal commissioned modern artist Issy Wooden for a portrait of the British pop star for the duvet of its first artwork subject in 20 years publishing this November.
Although Charli is deliberately absent from the award-winning album’s iconic, retina-singing inexperienced and blurry textual content cowl artwork, Wooden brings her entrance and heart once more in a concurrently fuzzy and edgy oil portrait on equally stunning orange velvet. Depicting Charli from her cupid’s bow to the crown of her head, the painter captures the arched brows and hooded eyes of the get together princess’s deadly stare piercing from beneath her buoyant waves.
For the portrait, the American-born British painter advised VF that she drew from “the length and quality of [Charli’s] career prior to the global success of brat, the throwaway candor of her lyrics, [and] the Britishness we both share.” However not with out including her personal prospers of yellow twinkles and sweeping white strains that loop and bounce throughout the singer’s face, components that stroll the road between a enjoyable Instagram face filter and doodles on the margins of 1’s dominated pocket book and push a surreal intimacy all through the portray.
Wooden’s portrait each references and enhances Aidan Zamiri’s photographs of Charli XCX for the singer’s October cowl story with the journal.
Issy Wooden, “Charli 2” (2025) (© Issy Wooden 2025; picture by Damian Griffiths, courtesy the artist, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, and Michael Werner Gallery)
Wooden, who additionally produces her personal music along with her established visible arts observe, seems to grasp at its core what Charli XCX means when she pronounces that “Everything is Romantic.” Maybe not essentially by “bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin,” because the singer emphasizes on the observe, however in different equally quotidian but charming sights and scenes: canker sores and tightened braces, rippling again muscle mass and glossy challah bread, automobile interiors and glossy revolvers.
Her work, a few of that are at present on view by January in a solo present at Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, flutter between alluring and unsettling as they faucet into forgettable moments and sensations, buried needs or suppressed fears, and curiosity past one’s management.
Wooden famous to the journal that it was a problem to seize some of the well-known faces of the 2020s in comparison with the character of her personal observe, however accepted any labels of the work studying as fan artwork as a result of that’s “one of the purest and most tender art forms we have.”
Like Wooden, Charli herself is markedly expressing curiosity in new inventive endeavors, from establishing herself and the followers who attended her impromptu album remix live performance at Storm King Artwork Middle final yr as “fine art bitches now” to occurring to star in forthcoming movies.
