Loie Hollowell U.S.A., b. 1983
"One of the main contents in my work, aside from it being about my body and a person in a female body, is the use of light in my painting practice." - Loie Hollowell
Loie Hollowell’s color-saturated, geometric canvases feature bodily forms arranged into sensual, abstracted compositions. Sex, pregnancy, and the embodied female experience are frequent themes; planetary shapes and patterns, mandalas, and lingams merge with phallic and vulvic imagery, giving cosmic resonance to intimate experiences. Hollowell has worked with spare symmetries and given her canvases a sense of tactility and dimension by building them up with sawdust and foam board.
For Hollowell, the scale of her work is particularly significant as she creates each work in direct correlation with the size of the body part depicted, be it her head, breasts, groin, or entire body. Furthering her exploration of physicality, Hollowell adheres sculpted forms onto her canvases to confound expectations of painting. Hollowell’s protruding forms are blended seamlessly, forcing the viewer to move around the canvas to determine whether it is an illusory flat surface or three-dimensional. This adds a playful, performative aspect to her work that speaks to Hollowell’s masterful manipulation of space, surface, light and shadow.
With strong colors, varied textures, and geometric symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of American artists like Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe and Judy Chicago. She is also greatly influenced by the work of the California Light and Space Movement as well as Neo-Tantric painters like Ghulam Rasool Santosh and Biren De.
