Liste Art Fair Basel

Lauren Satlowski
Liste Art Fair Basel
June 15 – 21, 2026
Booth 21
Hall 1.1, Messe Basel

Bel Ami presents new still life paintings by Lauren Satlowski at Liste Art Fair Basel 2026. Limned by enigmatic shadows and shot through with refracting streams of light, the artist’s latest works cast dime-store figurines and curios in elegiac tableaux. Her arrangements have the trappings of a theater or film set, where spotlights, scenery, and characters evoke action and elicit identification. Precarious and transitory elements such as burning wicks and oblique rays of sunshine imply an obscure chain of causes and effects—a narrative just beyond the threshold of recognition, flickering in the gloaming. Through her devotion to illumination, juxtaposition, and staging, Satlowski’s relics transcend their tabletop origins and are transposed to a mythic plane, recalling the durable allegories of classical friezes, the potent animism of Gothic ornaments, or the perspective of Carroll’s inquisitive Alice, undaunted and enraptured by wonderland.

Indeed, Satlowski’s compositions manipulate our estimates of scale, matter, and gravity: household dishes swell to architectural dimensions, suggesting a landscape view of grand, harmonious columns, before we somersault ninety degrees to register a top-down sightline, as in Garden (2026). Luminous caustics emanate from prismatic glassware, feigning contiguity between materials where no solid connections are to be found. Remarkably, these airy structures look no less capacious for having been flattened into paint on linen. Shadows, too, draw second glances, producing an especially animate impression in Spoon (2026), where a multiheaded Kabuki figure toting big red maraschinos appears to ascend from a liquor shot glass. The eponymous utensil, propped on its side and seen from above as an undulating metallic wave, casts an absorbingly broad penumbra across the base of the picture plane.

Engulfing us in sensuous and cathartic illusions, Satlowski’s paintings overtake the imagination, as when studying a miniature induces vertigo, or a particular silhouette at dusk briefly simulates a vital presence nearby. She reminds us that misapprehensions (and the white-knuckle responses they can trigger) are a trademark of animal nervous systems—a holdover from our species’ earliest days when failing to distinguish a leopard’s spots or a snake’s scales from the underbrush assured our demise.

Have the stakes of this game really changed, though? Our talent for distinguishing artifice from reality may now be more valuable than ever, as we face down the exponentially widening floodgates of generative mimicry. Consider this very text, with its tripartite lists and em dashes. Could you decide, with any degree of certainty, whether a human or an automaton designed it?

Lauren Satlowski (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Timothy Taylor (2025); Micki Meng (2024); Office Baroque (2023); Bel Ami (2020); DM Office (2019); ODD ARK (2018); and Wasserman Projects (2014). Her work is in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mohn Art Collective (MAC3), Los Angeles; and X Museum, Beijing.