Text by Irina Rusinovich
Finnish artist Satu Laurel paints worlds that seem to exist in the space between dreams and reality. Her canvases overflow with lush, impossibly vibrant landscapes jungles thick with greens that shouldn’t exist, mountains shrouded in mist, nature rendered not as it is but as the soul feels it should be. Yet within these fantastical scenes lies something more unruly: bold, gestural brushstrokes that remind us we’re looking at paint on canvas, not a window into another world. It’s this tension between the romantic ideal and the material fact of art-making itself, that animates everything she creates.
Laurel’s rise has been meteoric. Named one of Saatchi Art’s Rising Stars in 2024, she has exhibited across Finland and internationally, from the cable factory in Helsinki to galleries in New York, Vienna, and Cologne. Her work sits in public collections from Kuopio Hospital to Londonderry in the USA. Yet for all her institutional success, there’s something refreshingly uncompromising about her practice. She doesn’t soften her vision or water down her ambitions. Instead, she doubles down on the paradox that has always driven her: the collision between the visible and invisible, presence and absence, the material and the ideal.
We caught up with Satu to talk about landscape painting in the age of climate anxiety, why abstract strokes matter as much as representational form, and what it means to paint like no one’s watching when everyone is looking.
