In the spring of 2023, Pace Gallery mounted a solo presentation of Loie Hollowell's work that stopped visitors in their tracks. The canvases, with their luminous orbs and rising forms built from foam and pigment and sawdust, seemed to breathe. They occupied space the way bodies occupy space, with presence, with insistence, with something that felt unmistakably alive. For those already devoted to Hollowell's practice, the show was further confirmation of what they had suspected for years: this is one of the most genuinely original painters working in America today. Hollowell was born in 1983 in Woodland, California, a small city in the Central Valley whose flat agricultural landscape offers little obvious preparation for an art career of this ambition. She studied at Louisiana State University before earning her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she eventually settled and built the studio practice that defines her. The move to New York in her twenties placed her at the center of a conversation about painting's renewed possibilities, and she absorbed that energy without surrendering the deeply personal vision that has always been the engine of her work. Her early paintings showed a mind already drawn to symmetry and the symbolic charge of elemental forms. The circle, the oval, the vertical axis, the bilateral composition anchored at the center of the canvas: these became Hollowell's vocabulary, and she refined it with extraordinary focus. Her discovery of high density foam as a sculptural support transformed that vocabulary into something three dimensional and bodily in a completely new way. By building up her surfaces into rounded protrusions and softly inflated passages, she collapsed the distinction between painting and sculpture, creating objects that invite not just looking but a kind of visceral recognition. The conceptual heart of Hollowell's practice is the female body, experienced from the inside. Where so much art history has rendered women as objects seen from without, Hollowell paints from a position of embodied knowledge: the sensation of pregnancy, the mechanics and poetry of sexuality, the strangeness and familiarity of one's own physical self. Works like "Point of Entry (blood orange moon over orange sac)" from 2017 and "A Gentle Meeting of Tips" from 2018 carry titles that are both clinically precise and quietly lyrical, refusing the false choice between intellectual rigor and sensory delight. These are paintings that take erotic and reproductive experience seriously as subjects worthy of the same formal attention painters have historically given to landscape or portraiture. Among her most celebrated works are the "Lingam" paintings, which deploy Hindu iconography of the phallus as a sacred symbol to create compositions that are simultaneously spiritual and carnal, abstract and unmistakably figurative. "Stacked Lingam in Yellow and Purple" from 2017 and "Linked Lingam in green, purple, and orange" from 2018 layer these forms against radiant grounds, their jewel like color relationships recalling both Tantric art and the geometric abstraction of artists like Judy Chicago and Hannah Wilke who mapped new territory for the female body in art during the 1970s. Hollowell arrives at this lineage with full awareness, honoring it while pushing it into genuinely new formal territory. Her use of sawdust mixed into oil and acrylic medium gives her surfaces a matte, almost sandy warmth that feels entirely her own. Earlier works such as "Squirt" from 2015 and "Lick Lick in Brown and Green" from the same year demonstrate how completely formed Hollowell's vision already was a decade into her career. These paintings on linen over panel have the quality of icons, symmetrical and frontal and possessed of a strange calm despite their charged subject matter. They reward sustained attention in the way that great paintings always do, revealing new relationships between color, form, and surface the longer one spends with them. "Hung (detail)" from 2016 brings a comparable intensity, its composition hovering between representation and pure abstraction in a way that keeps the eye moving and the mind engaged. The institutional world has recognized Hollowell's significance with notable conviction. Her work entered the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the definitive measures of standing for an American artist, as well as the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. These acquisitions place her in dialogue with the longer arc of American art history and signal to collectors that her work has the kind of staying power that institutions stake their reputations on. Pace Gallery, which represents her, has brought her work before audiences in New York and internationally, ensuring that her audience continues to expand. For collectors, Hollowell's work represents a compelling proposition on multiple levels. The paintings on linen over panel from the mid 2010s have a particular significance as documents of a practice in its full early confidence, and works from that period carry considerable art historical weight. The dimensional canvases incorporating foam and mixed media are harder to replicate and carry an irreducible physical specificity that makes them especially prized. Works on paper, such as the pastel and graphite "Point of Entry" compositions, offer an entry point into the practice with all of its conceptual richness present in a more intimate format. Across all these categories, condition and provenance are paramount, and works with strong exhibition histories command justified attention. Hollowell belongs to a generation of painters, including artists like Cecily Brown and Lisa Yuskavage, who have reinvested figurative and bodily subject matter with formal seriousness after decades in which such concerns were considered peripheral to the dominant abstraction of the market. Like those artists, she draws on art history without being imprisoned by it, finding in the traditions of both Eastern and Western image making the tools she needs to say something new. Her particular contribution is a mode of abstraction so grounded in bodily knowledge that it feels less like a style than a form of direct speech, a language developed to say things that had not previously found adequate form. The significance of Hollowell's work today extends well beyond the art world's internal conversations. At a moment when questions of bodily autonomy, reproductive experience, and the representation of female interiority are subjects of profound cultural and political urgency, she is making paintings that address these questions not with rhetoric but with beauty, with formal intelligence, and with the kind of generous honesty that only great art achieves. To spend time with her work is to feel the world enlarged slightly, which is perhaps the oldest and best definition of what painting is for.
