If your Instagram feed looked slightly unhinged recently, there's a good reason for it. The day after the opening of Studio Iron - makeup artist and creative force Isamaya Ffrench's new exhibition at Saatchi Yates - the whole platform lit up with images that made people stop their doomscrolling dead in its tracks.
And honestly? Good. This is exactly the kind of art that deserves to hijack your feed.
What even is this place
According to Dazed, the show features a latex dress suspended above a plate of cracked eggs - which gallery staff replace periodically, because apparently someone's job is now Egg Refresher - a cyborg-esque feminine figure dramatically sprawled across the floor, and a large, glossy-panelled bed that looks equal parts inviting and deeply threatening.
So basically: your local IKEA showroom if IKEA was run by a villain from a 2077 movie. Incredible.
Why Isamaya Ffrench doing this makes complete sense
If you know Ffrench's work - and if you don't, please fix that immediately - this exhibition is less of a surprise and more of a logical conclusion. She's built her whole career around the collision of beauty, body horror, and high fashion. Her makeup work regularly makes people feel things they can't quite name, somewhere between attraction and existential dread.
Studio Iron feels like the physical manifestation of that exact aesthetic. It's a world she's been constructing piece by piece through beauty campaigns and editorials, and now she's just... given it a room. With eggs in it.
The cracked eggs are doing a lot of heavy lifting here
Let's be real - the detail that's going to live in people's heads is the eggs. There's something genuinely unsettling about a fragile, biological, very replaceable object sitting beneath a latex garment in a gallery context. It's the kind of image that sounds absurd when you describe it at a dinner party but hits completely different when you're standing in front of it.
That gap between description and experience is where Ffrench operates best. Studio Iron isn't a show you can fully understand from photos - it's one you need to feel slightly weird inside of.
If you're in London and you have even a passing interest in what happens when fashion, art, and body politics crash into each other at full speed, this one's worth the trip.
