I like choosing objects for their sense of familiarity, while exploring how many different meanings it can hold. I feel a conflicted nostalgia for the origin while pushing the object to also become something that's hard to read.
Lauren Satlowski (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work examines the emotional resonance and surreal potential of everyday objects. Raised in suburban Detroit and now living in Los Angeles, Satlowski draws from a wide range of influences, including Catholic iconography, Dutch still life, Rococo ornamentation, body horror, and photorealism.
Her practise begins with the careful collection and arrangement of objects—glass figurines, plastic flowers, handmade trinkets—which she transforms into intricate oil paintings. These staged compositions blur the line between reverence and distortion, elevating ordinary items into uncanny, emotionally charged icons.
Satlowski’s more recent work explores the symbolism of souvenirs and domestic ephemera, using the language of paint to investigate themes of nostalgia, artificiality, and the fragility of identity. Her paintings reveal a tension between the deeply personal and the universally uncanny, offering a hallucinatory encounter with the everyday.
