“I want there to be more exhibits about mothering,” says Loie Hollowell. An hour into our conversation, the New York-based painter is becoming more animated. We’ve got on to the subject of the artists whose work she’s been drawn to, such as Swedish feminist Monica Sjöö and her controversial 1960s canvas God Giving Birth. “My dream is to create an exhibition of visceral birth images, blood everywhere,” says Hollowell, a mother of two, laughing giddily. “I have proposed it in different ways. No one has taken me up on it yet. I’m kind of joking, but I’m not joking.”
Hollowell’s own paintings, being shown at Pace gallery in London next month, are more vibrational than visceral. She describes the work she started making more than a decade ago as “bodily abstractions about my sexuality”. They’ve since evolved to encompass her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding in compositions that are both intensely precise in their graphic symmetry and playfully suggestive in their placement of organic forms. Wrought in a spectrum of kaleidoscopic colours, they appear to exude a kind of cosmic energy.
It’s a heady combination that has swiftly propelled the 43-year-old to art star status. She has been represented by Pace since 2019; her work has been acquired by institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC; and several pieces have attracted auction sales in seven figures – her Standing in Red sold for $2.29mn at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2023.
“When I first saw her work, I just flipped out,” recalls Pace CEO Marc Glimcher. “I walked into her studio and it was like [seeing] the reincarnation of Hilma af Klint or Georgia O’Keeffe, combined with a sensibility that resonates with Robert Irwin. She just knows how to switch on these systems of bliss and awe.”
At her Brooklyn studio, a brightly patterned head scarf pulling back her dark blonde hair, Hollowell is putting the final touches to works that will be the focus of the London show. The process is painstaking, blending colour gradients with tiny brushes. “These paintings very much started with the birth of my children [Lyndon, seven, and Juniper, five] and have ended in me really trying to find a phenomenological light experience for the viewer,” she explains.
The series is centred on mirrored oval forms, one concave, one convex, protruding out from and sunken into the canvas. It was Hollowell’s husband – fellow artist Brian Caverly – who first came up with the configuration. “Then after I had Lyndon, I realised that it really spoke to that experience of being pregnant and then being empty,” she says. “If the piece was folded in half it would perfectly fit into itself, like mother and child.”
Hollowell was in her third trimester with Lyndon when she began to experiment with sculptural elements. “Getting pregnant threw off my practice in a destabilising way,” she says. “The physical change sent everything into chaos. I realised my work had to change.” She started taking casts of her body, and then of her pregnant friends’ bodies – “their breasts, their nipples, their bellies” – and incorporating them into her canvases.
Two of Hollowell’s favourite belly-cast paintings were shown last year in a group exhibition titled Good Mom/Bad Mom at Centraal Museum in Utrecht. “It was full of amazing images of motherhood and parenting,” she says. “It’s just not the kind of art I was exposed to growing up.”
Not to say that Hollowell’s childhood was especially conventional. She was raised in northern California, surrounded by a predominantly “hippie aesthetic: lots of Grateful Dead posters and psychedelic imagery”. She was named Loie after her grandma, Lois, but also in a nod to an American pioneer of modern dance. “Loie Fuller invented this burlesque kind of performance, swirling big silk fabrics and incorporating lights,” says Hollowell of her namesake. “She was painted by Toulouse Lautrec. Rodin was obsessed with her.”
Both of Hollowell’s parents are artists. She describes her dad as “a pointillist painter; a master realist. When I was young, he painted images of my mom and us in very composed, constructed rooms.” Her mother, meanwhile, is “an all-around creative person. She did cartoons for the local newspaper. She sewed a lot.” This, and her mother’s general “psychedelic-ness”, inspired her own creative path. At art school, Hollowell made “big sculptural fabric things” until she came to the conclusion “that painting was the most clear way to describe my feminist vision”.
Her New York studio is white-walled and workmanlike. Shelves are filled with row upon row of plaster casts. Slick steel sets of drawers open to reveal a sweet-shop-like selection of pastels, which she uses to create works on paper. The London show will feature pieces from the past 10 years.
“We had a pastel show [in New York] two years ago, and we had to kick people out almost every day,” says Glimcher of Dilation Stage, a presentation of 10 drawings depicting Hollowell’s pregnant belly. “The most remarkable thing about a Loie Hollowell show is that people sit and stay for a long time. I have a Loie from every period of Loie, and I spend time in front of them every single day.”
For Hollowell, there are two distinct sides to her practice: the more abstract, “self-possessed” paintings, and then “this more didactic body work, like the cast bellies”, she says. “I haven’t figured out how they go together yet.”
On the wall of her studio office she points out “a few little nipple experiments that I’m rotating”, as well as some of her own drawings and studies, and pieces by friends. These include a small textural painting by Montreal-based Veronika Pausova – “those are nipples there, squirting out milk” – says Hollowell, before moving on to a delicate surreal drawing by Dutch artist Kinke Kooi and a mystical piece by the Chinese artist Shuling Guo.
“It’s a collection of all my favourite artists,” says Hollowell, who also has a sizeable selection on display at her home, a small townhouse less than a mile from her studio that she refers to as “the nest”. “I make colourful, minimal abstractions, but what I want to live with are these sweet, feminine, soft, expressive paintings.” Her most treasured pieces are kept at the studio for daily inspiration – plus “I don’t want the kids to destroy them”, she smiles. Motherhood is a messy business, after all.
Loie Hollowell: Overview Effect is at Pace Gallery, London WI, from 4 March to 23 May
Source link
