Eva Yates examines the beauty and wellness industry, highlighting its destructive nature. Her work explores how these industries normalise obsessive eating and exercise habits, exacerbating eating disorders and reinforcing unrealistic beauty standards. Yates delves into the compulsive nature of beauty routines, picking spots and the fear of ageing. Yates shows a tension between vulnerability and control, focusing on the skin and using the sphinx cat as a parallel to human skin with exaggerated folds and textures. The animals in her paintings are a Metaphor for vulnerability and an unfiltered raw beauty. Yates comments on the beauty culture and the pressure to maintain flawless airbrushed skin. In a cultural landscape preoccupied with the polished, airbrushed ideals of the “clean girl aesthetic,” her work subverts these norms, revealing beauty in complexity, texture, and imperfection.
Eva Yates graduated the MA Painting course at the Royal College of Art in 2024. In 2019 Yates received The David S. Boger Patron Scholarship for her studies at the Grand Central Atelier. She has been in WhyNow publication, FAD magazine and LeeCultured.
