Frieze LA

Booth E4
Preview February 13, 2020

For Frieze Los Angeles, Bel Ami presents a two-person presentation by artists Miriam Laura Leonardi and Lauren Satlowski. Though they approach their chosen media from different schools of thought and locales, both Leonardi and Satlowski examine art history and contemporary culture to create their own coded visual languages for this moment.

Through various media, but particularly sculpture and installation, Miriam Laura Leonardi addresses the plight of the individual—as both a subject and object of the gaze. Leonardi investigates the problem of public presentation by focusing on the transmission of messages. In a new body of work for Frieze, she toys with language and visual modes deployed to address climate change in art, political campaigns, and advertising. In one series entitled Save the Planet (Pedestals), tall white lacquered plinths, typically used to display sculptures and products, become minimal artworks with a sardonic message. A designed eco insignia is carved into the surface of each pedestal with a razor blade. Here, the artist slyly directs attention away from the products, and toward the structures of promotion in the art and commercial system. A second series is similarly unassuming and fetishistic: in Malade au Coeur (Rags), handkerchiefs made from leather and latex and trimmed with measuring tape are delicately draped over wall nails. Jesting at our ability to carry on with business in the face of a personal (or global) crisis, these specialized cleaning tools offer an homage to lost love. In a third series entitled Your Fantasy My Tyranny, hand mirrors resembling those seen in Disney films have been warped by extreme heat. The fanciful sculptures reflecting our imperfect faces poetically reveal how fairytale dreams marketed to children starkly contrast with adult reality.

Lauren Satlowski’s paintings manifest psychological spaces that are both claustrophobic and vast. Her compositions feature polymorphous figures and forms in moments of transformation, rapt in power struggles with the very bodies they occupy. Referencing the history and techniques of painting, as well as cinematic tropes from horror and science fiction, Satlowski builds her own feminist lexicon. The artist meticulously renders seductive textures that double as skins: spilled water, tin foil, cellophane, porcelain, glass and chrome. Her iconic subjects expose the vulnerability of occupying impermanent bodies, and the urgency of realizing our strength. The figures are not idealized; nonetheless, their bodies are objectified on glossy oil painted surfaces, a medium that demands a reconciliation with the Western art tradition of exploitative power, possession and objectification. For Frieze, Satlowski has generated new paintings from sculptures and still life arrangements that stand in for the human body. Contending with the boundaries that demarcate the context from the individual, Satlowski explores the limits and potential of representation.
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Miriam Laura Leonardi (b. 1985, Lörrach, Germany) lives and works in Zürich. Leonardi holds a degree from Les Gobelins photography school in Paris and the ZHDK in Zürich. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Forde, Geneva; Gubelin at Art Genève, Geneva; L’ascensore, Palermo; Aguirre, Mexico City; Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Fri-Art, Kunsthalle Fribourg; Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zürich; Marbriers 4, Geneva; and Plymouth Rock, Zürich. Recent group exhibitions include Helmhaus, Zürich; Shivers Only, Paris; Instituto Svizzero, Rome; Swiss Institute, New York; Kunsthaus Glarus; Schloss, Oslo; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; and Paramount Ranch, Los Angeles.

Lauren Satlowski (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Los Angeles. Satlowski received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Wayne State University. Satlowski has held recent solo exhibitions with DM Projects, Paris, ODD ARK and Embassy in Los Angeles, and Wasserman Projects in Detroit. She has presented in group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Mexico, and Europe. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.