Isabelle McCormick is a painter from St Paul, Minnesota. Inspired by the centrality of the Venus figure throughout the complicated Western canon and its enduring influence across the social media screenscape, McCormick examines the relationship between self-surveillance and feminine archetypes enmeshed in the Venus pudica tradition. She employs traditional oil painting techniques to render virtual spaces that further unpack how internet culture remodels the visual language of femininity. 

Living in a society where the pressures of “la bella figura” pervade, the battle over the female body has become the material meat of her work. Across her paintings are reoccurring representations of a hollow, plastic and malleable standalone avatar glued to her phone screen. Painting is a way for McCormick to navigate the distance between the bodily self and social media façade. Wading into this space helps her better understand what it means to be a woman and artist in our hyperbolic world of retouching apps and reality TV.

McCormick is a graduate of the Brown University | Rhode Island School of Design Dual Degree Program, where she studied Literary Arts and Painting. She has served as the Resident Fellow for the RISD European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. Worked in Museum Education and Public Programs at The San Diego Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Exhibited nationally in New York, Detroit, Providence, Minneapolis, and San Diego, as well as abroad in Italy, Greece, and Lebanon.