Loie Hollowell, born in 1983 in Woodland, California explores the body as a site of transformation, abstraction and sensuality. Working primarily in painting and drawing, Hollowell distils the human form into symbolic geometries – mandorlas, ogees, lingams – rendering corporeal experience through a visual language that is at once deeply personal and cosmically expansive. Her compositions are anchored in symmetry and formal harmony, often drawing parallels between the rhythms of the body and the structures of the natural world. Themes of sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth recur throughout her work. Attentive to scale, Hollowell frequently tailors the dimensions of her compositions to correspond with the bodily forms they reference – breasts, abdomens, genitalia – inviting a visceral, spatial empathy in the viewer. In some works, sculptural protrusions or relief elements are embedded directly into the surface, heightening the optical illusion and physical immediacy of the image. Hollowell’s practice sits within a lineage of American artists such as Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe and Judy Chicago, whose work similarly engages with the metaphysical potential of the female form. Equally, her use of radiant colour fields and spatial manipulation draws influence from the California Light and Space movement, while her symbolic formalism echoes the spiritual abstraction of Neo-Tantric painters including Ghulam Rasool Santosh and Biren De.
Hollowell has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Anderson at VCU School of the Arts; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. She has a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. Hollowell lives and works in Queens, NY. Hollowell is represented in numerous public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Albertina Museum, Vienna; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; LACMA; ICA, Miami; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Kunstmuseum Hague, the Netherlands; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.