The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

This exhibition tracks the development of Hollowell’s visual language over ten years; a vocabulary that bridges abstraction with figuration, autobiography with art history, and biology with emotion. Orbiting two centuries of pioneering women artists that span generations and movements from Abstraction to Surrealism to 1960s Light and Space art, including Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Judy Chicago, Hollowell also cites Neo-Tantric painting as an important influence. Hollowell’s approach always begins with her own body as a guide to appraise seismic issues from sexual freedom to feminism, and reproductive rights and motherhood.

This survey’s focus considers time as material and theme. Hollowell turns the body into a metaphorical clock, documenting extreme intervals of change through dramatic chiaroscuro, saturated color, and charged light. Her labor-intensive process begins with a pastel drawing. She makes notes in the margins indicating how to translate her vision into painting. Her sentient compositions are then built with geometric and biomorphic forms, evocative of bellies, breasts, vulva, and buttocks that abstract the physical and emotional transformations she experienced throughout conception, birth, and postpartum with her two children. Her paintings are endowed with dimensional relief, achieved by adhering CNC-milled high-density foam or cast-resin appendages to the surfaces to impersonate fleshy bulges and curves. These protrusions, which vary in depth, soften the works’ rigid two-dimensionality, and evade the line between painting and sculpture to confront the viewer with visceral beauty. She uses a palette that glows, throbs, and blazes, a luminescent progression of reds, blues, yellows, oranges, greens, pinks, and purples, that vaunt a mercurial tempo from tender to explosive. Applying a rigorous symmetry in reference to the human body, she choreographs the energies and emotions that come from the mental and physical with an emphasis on the birthing body; the epicenter of the universe, where the heavens connect with the earth.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum monograph, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., featuring an essay by the curator Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

En Español

Loie Hollowell was born in 1983 and raised in Woodland, California. She currently lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA at University of California Santa Barbara in 2005 and an MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide including Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis; Pace Gallery; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Feuer/Mesler, New York; White Cube Gallery, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Flag Art Foundation, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Victoria Miro, London; and Ballroom Marfa, Texas. Her work is in public collections including the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; ICA, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Stedjelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland.

On Saturday, June 22, The Aldrich presented Gossip, a new performance commissioned by the Museum and a choreographed duet created in response to the current exhibition Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years. Choreographed and presented by dance artist Alexa West performed by Owen Prum and Chelsea Enjer Hecht. Gossip occurred as a live performance in the Museum’s first floor.

Costumes by Kate Williams. Music and sound design by Lucy Lie.

This performance was organized by Education Director Namulen Bayarsaihan and Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.