ABOUT

Isabella Theys (°1974 in Antwerp, Belgium), lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Theys’ oil paintings question the visual codes we've internalized and how portraits become cultural surfaces onto which society projects ideas of youth, gender, morality, and value.. Working against ageist assumptions and the idealization of youth, she portrays figures that resist normative standards of beauty, allowing signs of age, character, and vulnerability to occupy the center of the image.

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Oscillating between empathy and subtle humor, her paintings expose the tensions between lived experience and the polished ideals through which contemporary society constructs identity, femininity, and desirability. Rather than presenting figures as an object to be perfected, she approaches it as a site where personal history and collective expectations intersect.

Many of her works contain a quiet disruption: an ambiguous gesture, an improbable detail, or an unexplained presence that shifts the familiar into the uncanny. These elements resist straightforward interpretation, opening a space where social conventions begin to unravel and alternative readings emerge.

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Her paintings inhabit the territory of a contemporary fairy tale, one that gently subverts dominant narratives without abandoning tenderness. By lingering on figures that exist beyond prescribed ideals, Theys invites viewers to reconsider the values embedded in beauty culture and to find dignity, complexity, and quiet resistance in what is too often overlooked.