ART CITIES: London-Loie Hollowell
New York-based painter Loie Hollowell has, over the past decade, forged a distinctly autobiographical visual language that charts the elemental realities of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood through abstract form and sumptuous color. Her art—simultaneously visceral and transcendent—uses geometric constructs like the mandorla, ogee, and lingam to articulate bodily experience in terms that are at once intimate and universal.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
Loie Hollowell’s deeply personal practice anchors itself in symmetry and sculptural presence: central axes and protruding or recessed forms invite viewers to consider paintings not merely as pictures but as embodied fields of sensation. The scale of her works is carefully calibrated to the body—whether a head, a pregnant belly, or the axis of conception—so that her canvases resonate with an almost tactile choreography between viewer and surface.
Her latest series, “Overview Effect,” currently on view at Pace Gallery in London, marks both a continuation and transformation of Hollowell’s preoccupations. It is her first UK presentation since 2018 and follows her first retrospective survey, Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years, which travelled from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The exhibition’s title borrows from a term used by astronauts to describe the profound psychological shift that occurs when seeing the Earth from orbit: a dissolved sense of boundaries and a heightened sense of interconnectedness. For Hollowell, this cosmic metaphor resonates with her own experience of childbirth—specifically her second labour, delivered at home in a birthing tub. It was, she recalls in press accounts, a moment when between contractions she experienced a sense of detachment and transcendence, as if floating outside her own body.
In “Overview Effect”, this mental and physical oscillation is rendered visually through compositions of dual sculptural orbs—one convex, one concave—stacked vertically so that their expanding concentric lines overlap to form a horizontal mandorla. These orbs suggest biological and cosmic analogues alike: pregnant and empty bellies, celestial bodies in orbit, parallel universes of inside and outside. According to the exhibition press, the hovering mandorla becomes a visual nexus binding these dimensions and affirming the inherent unity of mother and child.
Color plays a crucial role: pulsating reds, primary yellows, and blues counterbalance muted, fleshy purples and gray-mauves, creating a field that feels simultaneously bodily and infinite. At a distance, the works manifest mathematical precision and symmetry; up close, dense, swirling mark-making suggests a microscopic reality of throbbing sensation and energy. This layered complexity mirrors the dualities at the heart of Hollowell’s vision—pain and pleasure, interior and exterior, contraction and expansion.
For the London iteration of the series, Hollowell has returned to a scale of approximately 183 × 137 cm —a “human size,” she notes—which allows for greater chromatic nuance and emotional nuance than the larger canvases first seen at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery the previous year. Across seven works, sequences of light explore transitions from dawn through midday into dusk, drawing subtle inspiration from her Californian roots while extolling the rhythms of the body.
What distinguishes Hollowell’s work is its unapologetic fusion of personal narrative with archetypal motifs. While her early works drew overtly on sexual imagery and sacred iconography, her more recent output transforms these impulses into expansive gestural abstractions. Through repeated forms and gradations of color, her canvases become sites of ritualized feeling—where the subjective experience of motherhood becomes a shared visual lexicon.
In “Overview Effect”, the physical act of childbirth becomes a metaphor for cosmic connection, an embodiment of the fragile yet profound continuum that binds body to cosmos. In doing so, Hollowell not only redefines the boundaries of abstract painting but also expands the vocabulary through which we understand bodily experience itself.
Photo: Loie Hollowell, Spectrum XVI, 2024, oil paint, acrylic medium, aqua resin, epoxy resin, and sawdust on linen over panel, 16 parts, each 12-1/8″ × 9″ × 2-1/2″ (30.8 cm × 22.9 cm × 6.4 cm), © Loie Hollowell, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery
Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 4/3-23/5/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-16:00, www.pacegallery.com/
