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Thursday 6 February

Loie Hollowell: Mapping the Cosmic Body

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. I know you think you know everything about contemporary art with your obscure theories and your openings where organic wine costs more than the exhibited works. But today, I’m going to tell you about Loie Hollowell, born in 1983, an artist who shatters your neat little categories to create something truly revolutionary.

While our contemporary art world worships concept over sensation, where convoluted explanations are preferred to visceral experiences, Hollowell dares to do exactly the opposite. Her monumental canvases, with their sculpted reliefs and hypnotic color gradients, immerse us in a universe where the female body becomes cosmos. Make no mistake: this isn’t just another geometric abstraction in the saturated landscape of contemporary art. Hollowell creates an entirely new visual language, where each shape, each color pulses to the rhythm of femininity’s most intimate experience.

Let’s take her recent “Split Orbs” series from 2021. These imposing works, with their twin spheres traversed by luminous lines of force, represent far more than a mere formal exploration. They embody a deep meditation on the duality of bodily existence, particularly in the context of motherhood. Where many artists would settle for literal representation or cold abstraction, Hollowell offers us a transcendent experience that engages all our senses.

It was Edmund Burke who wrote in the 18th century about the sublime as an experience that overwhelms and terrifies us while irresistibly drawing us in. Hollowell updates this notion by creating works that confront us with the primordial power of the female body, this force capable of creating life but also of making us face our own mortality. In her paintings, a simple circle is never just a circle. it becomes alternately a nurturing breast, a forming planet, a portal to another dimension of experience.

Her formal vocabulary is exceptionally rich. The mandorlas, these almond-shaped forms that evoke both the vulva and the sacred aureole of medieval religious art, become under her brush ambiguous symbols that transcend the simple dichotomy between sacred and profane. The ogives, borrowed from Gothic architecture, transform into milk-filled breasts or mystical mountains. Each form is charged with multiple meanings that mutually enrich each other.

Light plays a major role in her work, and not just as a pictorial effect. Through her subtle gradients and relief surfaces, Hollowell creates works that seem to generate their own inner luminosity. It was Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling who spoke of light as a manifestation of the absolute in the material world. Hollowell’s paintings embody this idea by transforming light into an almost tactile presence that simultaneously reveals and transcends the materiality of the body.

Her use of color is particularly sophisticated. Celestial blues melt into flesh pinks that explode into blood reds, creating a chromatic choreography that evokes the ebb and flow of bodily sensations. In “Dilation Stage” (2024), her most recent series, each color variation corresponds to a different stage of childbirth, transforming physical experience into a visual symphony of rare intensity.

What truly distinguishes Hollowell from her contemporaries is that she maintains a perfect balance between abstraction and figuration. Her works can simultaneously evoke a vulva and an aurora borealis, a nursing breast and a solar eclipse. This ambivalence isn’t a gratuitous game but a sophisticated strategy to make us reflect on our relationship with the body, particularly the female body that our society tends to either hyper-sexualize or render invisible.

The influence of the Californian Light and Space movement is evident in her work, notably in her way of treating light as a malleable substance. But where artists like Robert Irwin explored the limits of pure perception, Hollowell anchors her luminous explorations in the most concrete bodily experience. Her works remind us that all perception, even the most abstract, necessarily passes through the filter of the body.

Her technique is as remarkable as her formal vocabulary. Hollowell constructs her paintings like sculptures, adding layers of high-density foam and resin to create reliefs that capture and reflect light in complex ways. This tactile dimension is essential to her artistic project. The shadows cast by these reliefs aren’t simply decorative effects but an integral part of the work, creating a luminous choreography that changes according to the viewer’s position. With these materials, Hollowell gives physical presence to experiences often considered ineffable. The surfaces of her paintings become sensitive topographies that invite both touch and sight.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Perception, spoke of the body not as a simple object in space but as the very medium of our being-in-the-world. Hollowell materializes this philosophical idea by creating works that make us literally feel in our own bodies the sensations they evoke. Looking at her paintings becomes an embodied experience where vision activates all our other senses.

Her systematic use of symmetry isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s a philosophical statement about the precarious balance between order and chaos, between control and abandonment, that characterizes bodily experience. In her works on childbirth, this symmetry becomes a powerful metaphor for the birth process itself – a moment when the body literally divides into two distinct entities while maintaining a fundamental unity.

The temporal dimension is also important in her work. In her “Around the Clock” series (2022), she transforms the daily cycle of breastfeeding into a visual meditation on the cyclical time of the maternal body. The breasts, arranged like the hours of a clock, become markers of time that is no longer linear but organic, rhythmed by the infant’s needs rather than social conventions.

The influence of tantric art is evident in her work, but Hollowell doesn’t simply reproduce traditional forms. She reinvents them in a contemporary context, creating a fascinating dialogue between Eastern spirituality and Western bodily experience. Her works suggest that the sacred isn’t to be sought in a mystical beyond but in the immediate experience of the body.

What’s particularly remarkable in her recent work is how she approaches the experience of childbirth. In an artistic tradition that has largely avoided this subject or relegated it to the margins, Hollowell places it at the center of her practice. Her representations of cervical dilation transform this physiological process into a cosmic epic where the maternal body becomes the site of universal transformation.

The political dimension of her work should not be underestimated. In a context where reproductive rights are constantly threatened, where the female body remains an ideological battlefield, Hollowell’s works affirm the power and autonomy of the female body. Her work on abortion, notably in “Emerald Mountain” (2013), addresses this experience not as trauma but as a moment of liberation and self-affirmation.

There is a deeply Spinozist dimension in her work. For Baruch Spinoza, body and mind were merely two aspects of the same substance, and joy was linked to the increase in our power to act. Hollowell’s works embody this philosophy by celebrating the power of the female body without ever reducing it to mere materiality. Each painting is an affirmation of the joy that can emerge even from the most intense physical experiences.

Her treatment of sexuality is particularly nuanced. Unlike many artists who unconsciously reproduce the male gaze, Hollowell creates works that celebrate female desire in all its complexity. Her “Linked Lingams” are not simple phallic representations but sophisticated explorations of the interconnection of sexual energies.

In her most recent works, Hollowell pushes her exploration of corporality even further by integrating direct casts of pregnant women’s bodies. These sculptural elements create a fascinating bridge between abstraction and physical reality, between artistic representation and direct bodily presence. It’s a bold evolution that reaffirms her commitment to anchoring her work in lived experience while maintaining a transcendent dimension.

Hollowell’s chromatic palette has also expanded over the years. To the flesh tones and celestial blues of her early works have been added bile greens, twilight mauves, and electric fuchsias that broaden the emotional spectrum of her work. Each color is calibrated not only for its visual value but for its ability to evoke a specific physical sensation.

What makes her work particularly relevant today is that she creates works that resist digital reproduction. In a world where art is increasingly consumed via screens, Hollowell’s paintings demand physical presence. The interplay of shadow and light, subtle reliefs, and variations in texture can only be fully appreciated in person, reminding us of the importance of direct experience in an increasingly mediated world.

Loie Hollowell’s work represents far more than a simple formal innovation in the field of geometric abstraction. It is a bold attempt to create a new visual language capable of expressing the ineffable – those moments when our bodily experience becomes so intense that it transcends the limits of conventional representation. In an artistic landscape often dominated by cynicism and intellectual distance, her work reminds us that art can still touch us at the deepest level of our being, make us feel in our flesh the transformative power of aesthetic experience.

And you know what? If this makes you uncomfortable, if these bodies transformed into cosmos disturb you, if this unabashed celebration of female corporality unsettles you, perhaps this is exactly what contemporary art needs. In a world that constantly seeks to disembody us, to make us forget our corporeal condition, Hollowell’s work is a monumental reminder of our fundamental humanity, in all its terrible and sublime beauty.

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