Loie Hollowell is a Californian-born artist. Her artworks deal with sensuality, sexuality, and a woman’s body experience.
Hollowell created colorful elemental and organic shapes. At the first sight, it looks like other abstract paintings but when we look closer, the three-dimensional part of her work has different layers. It gives unique shadow and illusion effects compare with color illusion in painting. Hollowell created both illusion and real space on canvas with its blend of painting and sculpture.
Loie Hollowell, From the Beginning (inversed), 2017, oil paint, acrylic medium, sawdust, and high-density foam on linen mounted on panel, 48″ × 36″ × 3-1/2″ (121.9 cm × 91.4 cm × 8.9 cm) © Loie Hollowell . source: https://www.pacegallery.com/
Hollowell’s Geometric forms in contrast color remind me of Sonia Delaunay’s Orphism, which brings together contrast colors in harmonious compositions. However, Hollowell’s artworks are actually closer to the work of American artists like Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Judy Chicago. She is also mainly influenced by the work of the California Light and Space Movement as well as Neo-Tantric painters like Ghulam Rasool Santosh and Biren De.
Hollowell was inspired by her own existential experience of pregnancy, abortion, and her mother’s letting down in the public when she was in the breastfeeding period. Hollowell transcends all of her bodily experience into elemental forms, like a sphere, oval, and curved lines. They represent the pregnant belly, breast, vagina, and uterus. She is using symmetry and often anchoring her composition in a central singular axis.
Loie Hollowell, Standing in Blue, 2018, oil paint, acrylic medium, sawdust, and high-density foam on linen mounted on panel,72″ × 54″ × 3-1/2″ (182.9 cm × 137.2 cm × 8.9 cm) © Loie Hollowell. Source: https://www.pacegallery.com/
Hollowell’s artworks are in “liminal space between figurative and abstraction”, also between painting and sculpture. Her works show Hollowell’s skillful manipulation of space, surface, light, and shadow. They speak about the core experience of sensuality and body as a site of desire, pleasure, and pain. Her works are also pivotal to voice women’s bodily experience that is often considered as trivial matters.
Loie Hollowell’s Transcendent Bodies | Art21
