Isamaya Ffrench with Saatchi Yates open "Studio Iron"

Isamaya Ffrench leaves beauty behind and steps into steel. With Studio Iron, she builds a brutalist universe where art, design, and discomfort collide—sharp, industrial, and impossible to ignore.

Isamaya Ffrench presents ‘Studio Iron’

Isamaya Ffrench is pushing her world beyond beauty and into brutalist interiors. Teaming up with Saatchi Yates for Studio Iron, the inaugural exhibition of her newly launched design gallery, the creative director and beauty provocateur presents a group show where art, design and object collapse into one another. Running from 30 April to 7 June, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a stark post industrial environment built from steel, iron and psychological tension.

Among the standouts is Jannis Kounellis’s monumental wall-mounted steel work, a heavy Arte Povera relic forged from industrial materiality, while Paul McCarthy injects grotesque humor with his oversized reflective inflatable butt plug, turning pop iconography into something surreal and hollow. Jordan Wolfson contributes a bumper sticker-covered chair buzzing with visual noise, and Anne Imhof’s readymade benches draped with footballs summon the eerie vacancy of locker rooms and liminal waiting spaces.

Elsewhere, Marina Abramović appears suspended in a kitchen in a quietly uncanny film installation that reframes domestic space as something uncanny and threatening, while Nico Vascellari’s Visita Interiora Terrae documents the artist unconscious and dangling from a helicopter above the clouds, pushing the body to psychic and physical extremes. Works by Hannah Levy, Kelly Wearstler, Marco Panconesi, Miriam Cahn, Marlene Dumas, Peter John and Anselm Kiefer extend the show’s meditation on alienation, unease and the psychological architecture of contemporary life.

Best known for her boundary-pushing work across fashion and beauty, Isamaya Ffrench has long treated aesthetics as worldbuilding. With Studio Iron, she expands that vision into physical space, imagining a world where art and design no longer behave, and where beauty gives way to something darker, sharper and more industrial.