Loie Hollowell

American painter Loie Hollowell imagines abstracted landscapes of the female body, a subject rendered both personal and universal. Her recent series of nine paintings, for example, explored the different stages of her pregnancy from conception through birth. Throughout her career, Hollowell has continued to employ an evocative vocabulary of shapes including the mandorla, ogees and lingams in a rich, jewel-toned color palette. Her multi-step process begins with planning her compositions through a separate line drawing, followed by planning colors with pastels. Before replicating this drawing in oil paint, she often uses molding paste, sawdust, high density foam and gesso to build up a textured surface on the canvas. 

As an early-career artist, Hollowell began showing her work publicly in 2008, but by 2015 she had garnered significant critical attention in the art world. In the fall of 2019, she was selected as one of six inaugural exhibitions at PACE Gallery’s new global headquarters in New York City. With bold colors, geometric shapes and symmetrical compositions, Hollowell’s practice alludes to Georgia O’Keeffe, Gulam Rasool Santosh, Judy Chicago and Hilma Af Klint. Her comparisons to Klint and Santosh are particularly apt, as Hollowell is inspired by tantric and spiritual painting traditions. Born in St. Peter, Minnesota in 1983, she now lives in New York City.

-       Linked Lingams in Red and Blue, 2015, Oil on linen and panel, 28 x 21 inches (71.1 x 53.3 cm), an early work shown in The New York Times

-       Lady in Green, 2014, Oil on canvas 64 x 48 inches (162.6 x 121.9cm), an early work that has recently set the artist's auction record

 -       Linked Lingam in blue, gray, pink and copper, 2018