ART CITIES: N.York-Loie Hollowell

Known for paintings and drawings that explore the bodily landscape, Loie Hollowell’s practice exists in the liminal space between abstraction and figuration, otherworldly and corporeal. Originating in autobiography, her work explores themes of sexuality, pregnancy and birth. Hollowell’s geometric compositions use symbolic shapes such as the mandorla, ogee, and lingam to build her distinctive visual lexicon.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

In referencing her own personal experiences, Loie Hollowell’s paintings are at once personal and universal in their fierce vulnerability. Her use of symmetry – often anchoring her compositions in a central, singular axis – relates her paintings to her own body as well as the natural world. Loie Hollowell in her solo exhibition “Dilation Stage” presents new large-scale drawings and is her first exhibition in the city dedicated exclusively to her works on paper. Hollowell is known for her otherworldly paintings and drawings of bodily landscapes. Through a unique lexicon of geometric and organic forms that represent elements of her body, the artist explores experiences of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and motherhood. Manipulating real and illusory space on the canvas, she uses radiant colors, varied textures, and protruding sculptural elements to draw viewers into her energetic compositions. In her exhibition Hollowell presents ten new pastel drawings that document the dilation stage of labor, in which the cervix opens and effaces from one to ten centimeters, allowing the baby to move into the birth canal. Displayed sequentially on a rounded wall that reflects the shape of a pregnant belly, these drawings feature, at their centers, depictions of Hollowell’s own pregnant abdomen, rendered to scale. Below each belly is a circle the exact size of the effaced cervix as it expands. Meanwhile, radiating bands of color—which represent the increasingly intense pain of contractions during the dilation stage—fill the spaces around the bellies. In each composition, these rippling colors respond to the hue of the swollen wombs from which they emanate— Hollowell assigns light colors to minimally painful contractions, while intensely painful contractions take on dark colors. The cervical “circles” at the bottom of each drawing seem to pulse as the series progresses, culminating in a blazing cadmium red. For this body of work, in which color is a highly charged force, Hollowell adopts a wide ranging palette to express the mental and physical sensations she has experienced while giving birth. “When the first contractions started with each of my pregnancies, I was filled with joy and excitement that I would soon be meeting my baby,” Hollowell says. “I rendered this stage in yellow, like the sun on a cloudless day, full of light and optimism. As my cervix dilated, the pain became increasingly intense and sharp, so I moved into bright, deep reds for that stage. My second birth was at home in a birthing tub—I was enveloped in buoyant, luke-warm water while also having this searing and heavy pain. I felt only an ultramarine blue could rightfully signify that experience”. In addition to these drawings, the exhibition includes a unique birthing bench that Hollowell created collaboratively with her husband, sculptor Brian Caverly. The history of the birthing chair, which has been used by women in labor throughout millennia, extends all the way back to 1450 BCE Egypt. In Caverly and Hollowell’s rendition, which visitors are invited to sit on, space is created not just for the birther, but also for the partner, midwife, doula, doctor, or any other witness to the transcendent journey of birth.

Photo: Loie Hollowell, Five Centimeters Dilated, 2023, Oil, acrylic medium, and epoxy resin on linen over panel, 45 x 52 1/2 x 8 inches / 114.3 x 133.3 x 20.3 cm, © Loie Hollowell, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, USA, Duration: 8/3-20/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/