Loie Hollowell
Loie Hollowell
Born 1983 in Woodland, CA
Lives and works in New York City
Represented by Pace Gallery
EDUCATION
2012 Master of Fine Arts in Painting at Virginia Commonwealth University
2005 Bachelor of Arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in the Department of the College of Creative Studies
Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, Woodland, California) earned a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Originating in autobiography, her paintings explore themes of sexuality, often through abstractions of the human body and an emphasis on female forms. With strong colors, varied texture, and the symmetry of sacred geometry, her works evoke bodily landscapes and allude to iconography such as the almond-shaped mandorlas found in medieval religious painting. Hollowell was the recipient of a 2011 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Award. She lives and works in New York.
In works saturated with color, sacred geometry, and sensual energy, Loie Hollowell shows the expansive possibilities for exploration through concentrated colors and forms. Working primarily in acrylics, the New York-based painter builds complexity and depth within each field of color, incorporating high-density foam board and sawdust to intensify this interdimensional quality. Hollowell’s work thrives on the cusp of abstraction, where compelling inversions of familiar shapes are energized by the tension between the symmetry and physicality of primordial forms, like the mandorla and lingam. “In my head, my paintings are realistic depictions of bodies and actions. Even though I’m constantly trying to push the figure into an abstract space, I can never get the realism of where it originated out of my head.”
