FIAC

Booth G26

For FIAC, Bel Ami presents a two-person exhibition by Soshiro Matsubara and Lauren Satlowski. Both artists engage in a conversation about emotional attachment to objects, and the mystery of objects taking on life-like qualities. In works that vitrify reality and illusion, objects tethered to their materiality hover on the edge of transformation. The display of paintings and sculptures hints at the alienation and the allure of romancing inanimate things.

Lauren Satlowski’s new paintings seductively articulate textures–soft flower petals, prismatic glass, soapy films–that double as skins, exposing the vulnerability and resilience of impermanent bodies. Rendering sculptural arrangements of souvenirs and hotel-size toiletries, Satlowski references the vanitas still-life, with its commitment to the material and ineffable. In Faultline (2021) a stack of glassy objects preserves fallen strands of hair on a watery table top and a spider inside a resin paperweight. These haunting keepsakes, painted with elegiac reverence, are stripped of their specific histories. Like a precious memento of a past love, Satlowski reawakens the dead object, imbuing it with both portent and loss.

In his sculptures and installations Soshiro Matsubara reinterprets Western art’s twisted and sometimes humorous manifestations of romantic longing. A recent series of ornamental wall lamps entitled Last Night interrogates the patriarchal idea of woman-as-mystery; entwined figures resembling Medusas threaten to turn those who would idol-worship them into stone. In Engagement, Tolerance and Hospitality (2018) a sculpture of multiple figures engaged in S&M practices shows how images that capture a cultural preoccupation with the “forbidden” may crowd out the reality of our most intimate exchanges. At FIAC Matsubara continues to stage scenarios of intimacy and exclusion, of love and longing.

Soshiro Matsubara (b. 1980, Hokkaido, Japan) lives and works in Vienna. He has held solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; Schiefe Zähne, Berlin; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Brennan & Griffin, New York; and XYZ collective, Tokyo. Recent group exhibitions include Winterfest, Aspen Art Museum and The Sentimental Organization of the World, Crèvecoeur, Paris. His work is in the collection of the Lewben Art Foundation, Vilnius.

Lauren Satlowski (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Los Angeles. Satlowski has held solo exhibitions with Bel Ami, Los Angeles; DM Office, Paris; ODD ARK and Embassy in Los Angeles; and Wasserman Projects in Detroit. Recent group exhibitions include Page (NYC) at Petzel, New York and My Secret Garden, Asia Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan. Her work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and X Museum, Beijing.