Painter Lauren Satlowski Turns Personal Treasures Into Fine Art

On a muggy afternoon in late July, Lauren Satlowski is walking around her two-room studio, perched on a high floor in a century-old Art Deco tower in the historic core of downtown Los Angeles. Dressed in a white tank top, red sweatpants, and navy Adidas soccer sandals, Satlowski sifts through an assortment of seemingly random objects spread across adjoining worktables. There are candies in shiny golden wrappers, paperweights with all kinds of treasures trapped inside them, matching powder-blue porcelain figurines from Romania, and a pair of Depression-era cameos carved out of coral stone that the Detroit-born artist bought because, she says, “they look like Valley girls to me.”

In this homey urban aerie, Satlowski arranges her kitschy collections into the “organizational hierarchy” that will inform her hyper realistic still-life paintings. Luminous and glassy, the tactile and tediously constructed tableaux can take months to finish and are often centered around shiny or transparent objects—compact discs, perfume bottles, pools or beads of water, blocks of resin encasing fake flowers or real arachnids—that she adorns with quotidian, if precisely selected, objects like beans, stickers, iron-on patches, glistening orchids, doll-like humanoid figures (some with holes in them) or tiny bedazzled drama masks. These uncanny compositions are now in the collections of LACMA, ICA Miami, and the X Museum in Beijing; they also form the basis of Amateurs of Time, Epicures of Duration, her forthcoming solo show at Micki Meng, opening in Paris on October 15.

“How to make a painting of an object is like a riddle I’m trying to solve,” says Satlowski, who doesn’t make things easy for herself. Take, for example, her painting of a Ziploc sandwich bag. It’s half-filled with water, a long strand of hair trapped between the baggie and the white wall it’s affixed to with clear, glossy tape. The layers of transparency are mind-boggling, as is the Sharpie rendering on the outside of the Ziploc depicting William Ely Hill’s 1888 cartoon drawing My Wife and My Mother-in-Law. For Satlowski, these plastic and glass portals, which appear in numerous works, are simply “tools” to help her push still-life painting into new territories of trompe l’oeil mastery while commenting on art history, the female figure, power dynamics, and objectification.

“I like sampling and I like objects retaining their sense of origin but also transcending that and being something familiar, but then something you can’t quite grasp,” says Satlowski. “I never have the intention of illustrating some sort of meaning.”

Satlowski begins her paintings by photographing her assemblages—the act of collecting has always been the foundation of her labor-intensive process. As a child growing up in the Detroit suburbs, Satlowski would marvel at the figurines locked away from the hands of children in her grandmother’s cabinets. Her late father was a motorcycle-riding electrician who collected mechanical objects and guns. “He just couldn’t let anything pass that he might find useful,” says Satlowski. Her mother is a prosthodontist, who makes fake teeth from porcelain; by day she applies hundreds of shades of white paint to dental veneers, and by night she bakes cakes or draws comic books as gifts for her friends.

“I find a lot of similarities between what I do and what my mom does. She’s very carefully, gently layering on paint alone in her lab, which is very similar to how I think about my studio,” says Satlowski. “She’s making these things that sit within teeth that look exactly the same, but are not. They’re made with the intention of having a realness and there’s a level of intimacy to working on something that will be a part of someone’s body. I feel very intimately towards my paintings in my practice. There’s a lot of closeness there and the way that people connect with them once they leave the studio, they become personal.”

In grad school, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Satlowski’s work was focused on body horror (think Cronenberg movies and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) via close-up portraits of figurines altered and adorned with prosthetics and face paint. Cronenberg films and Frankenstein can both be viewed as critiques of religion and, for Satlowski, her early Midwestern experiences with the church are part and parcel of her paintings. “I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic schools and that was a really big influence,” she says. “My paintings become really devotional and there’s also a strong sense of discipline in the practice, a sense of repetition or going over things again and again.”

When she arrived in Los Angeles a decade ago, Satlowski discovered the work of the Massachusetts-born artist Catherine Murphy and her “poetic use of objects”—realist paintings of cluttered offices, of a foil balloon stuck in a ceiling corner, or of a forest landscape viewed through the word “Cathy” scrawled over a fogged window. “They really brought a shift in the way I was thinking,” she says.

Those early influences might have prompted her to tease out the painterly possibilities of trinkets scoured from eBay, flea markets, or thrift stores, but lately Satlowski has been making her own poetic objects. For a painting that she calls the “odd man out” in her Paris exhibition—but which may actually be its centerpiece—Satlowski began with a doodle on a transparency, which ultimately became a clay sculpture of a demonic, windswept face experiencing velocity to the point where its flesh is ripping off its skull. This white-skinned, white-haired speed demon is led by a set of perfectly glistening teeth champing down on a hand-rolled cigarette. Her cartoonish, and cartoonishly haunting, character floats over a landscape-oriented canvas filled with the words “days work,” which form the basis of a patinated steel plate backdrop.

“The text is really important,” says Satlowski, noting she borrowed it from an ad from the tobacco company Days O Work (now Days Work) because, she says, “I wanted this repetition and sense of time and a kind of droning quality.” It’s a motif that speaks to the tension in a lot of her paintings—the balance between monotony and a lack of control—that is really just a hyper-realist reflection of current day life. Despite all the calculation that goes into her work, Satlowski admits that she, like the ghoul in her painting, are at the whims of some bigger, cosmic force. “We don’t have any control,” she says. “So just get into it.”