Loie Hollowell (American, b. 1983) makes abstract paintings built from the shapes of her own body, using symmetrical, biomorphic forms to explore sexuality, pregnancy and birth.,She raises her compositions off the canvas with sculpted reliefs of high-density foam and resin, so the paintings read as somewhere between two and three dimensions.,,Raised in Woodland, California, she lives and works in New York City.,
Hollowell earned a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005 and an MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012.,Her turn toward abstraction began in 2013 with Happy Vagina, a black-and-white self-portrait made shortly after an abortion, for which she drew on the symmetry and visceral imagery of Judy Chicago and Georgia O'Keeffe.A chance meeting in Chelsea with her former teacher, the painter Ridley Howard, led to a studio visit and a show at his gallery, 106 Green, which drew a review from New York Times critic Martha Schwendener and, within a year, representation by Pace gallery. Hollowell has said the paintings begin with her own body and her husband's, a sculptor who taught her to build up her canvases with foam and resin forms.Motherhood reshaped her process further.She has described herself as a slow painter who, after having two children, learned to limit how long she spends revising small details in a painting.,
Her paintings are held in institutional collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In 2024 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presented “Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years”, her first museum survey, which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and included new pastel drawings and paintings incorporating life casts of pregnant breasts and bellies.Pace Gallery has given her solo shows in Palo Alto, London, Hong Kong, New York and Los Angeles, including “Overview Effect” in Los Angeles in 2024 and in London in 2026.,,Her painting Split Orb sold for $450,000 through Pace's booth at Frieze Los Angeles, among the fair's top reported sales that year.
