We spoke to the renowned London-based painter in Texas, on the eve of her show at Ballroom Marfa – a rare public performance of her perverted pop music

I’m deep in West Texas, outside a quaintly makeshift-looking structure once used as a marketplace for cattle. You can see Mexico from here, south of the Rio Grande. The mountains in the distance look blue against the apricot sky, the sun is on its descent and the shadows lengthen as trucks and cars congregate in the adjoining field. Despite the flow of margaritas, it’s not a rowdy crowd – the atmosphere is buoyantly good-willed. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a very eventful night for the one policeman stationed at the door. “Any trouble?” I ask him. “All quiet so far, ma’am,” he assures me, with solemn gallantry. 

As the light continues to wane, a name projected onto the venue’s corrugated iron facade becomes more visible: Issy Wood. You’ve surely seen Wood’s paintings in one of the many institutions to have acquired her beguiling works of unsettling realism for their permanent collections … Tate, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name a few. A former livestock auction place in the Lone Star State might seem an incongruous destination to encounter this art world darling, but this isn’t any old dot on the map – this is Marfa, the remote desert town visionary artist Donald Judd began transforming into an oasis of dazzling contemporary art in 1971. It’s home to Judd’s Chinati Foundation, the Judd Foundation, and Elmgreen & Dragset's famous Prada Marfa on Route 90, an oft-photographed permanent installation, which appears to be an improbable luxury store in the desert. And it’s not just a random former agricultural building either – this is the Bull Room, recently acquired and renovated by Ballroom Marfa as an extension of their ambitious cultural programming.