aul McCarthy distorts the familiar visual language of pop culture with a large-scale inflatable butt plug rendered in reflective fabric, at once absurd, confrontational and hollow. Jordan Wolfson contributes a chair covered in bumper stickers more commonly reserved for cars, each one clamouring for attention in a chaotic collision of messaging and surface. A bench by Anne Imhof, rendered in bronze, with footbal jerseys draped over one edge, evoking the residue of a locker room or waiting area, heightening the industrial tension of non-places and transitional space.

A film installation by Marina Abramović, depicting the artist levitating within a kitchen setting, extends the exhibition’s engagement with domestic space through a register of subtle absurdity, drawing attention to the hard, angular and often quietly threatening structures that shape everyday life. Nico Vascellari presents Visita Interiora Terrae (2020), in which the artist, anaesthetised and unconscious, was suspended by bungee cord from a helicopter and carried above the clouds. Created in defiance of his phobia of heights and at significant physical cost, the work pushes the body into a zone of psychic and material extremity.

Also featured are works by Hannah Levy, Kelly Wearstler, Marco Panconesi, Miriam Cahn, Marlene Dumas, Peter John and Anselm Kiefer, each engaging in different ways with tension, unease, alienation and the increasingly psychological conditions of contemporary life.

As the opening statement of ‘Studio Iron’, the exhibition proposes a world in which the distinctions between art and design are no longer fixed, but actively unsettled. What emerges is a raw vision of the present: a collision between the post-industrial and a degraded form of pop; brutal, austere and stripped of ornament.