ART
Loie Hollowell’s stacked lingams shelter a seemingly opposed creed within their phallic folds – freedom of the vagina. christina ko reports
Loie Hollowell
WERE HE STILL ALIVE, Freud would have had a field day analysing the work of Loie Hollowell, the young painter who’s been called a “Georgia O’Keeffe for the Instagram age” (it’s kind of true, though the description is obviously a bit reductionist). While abstract, her canvases display overt figurative influences – saturated shapes mimic the forms of various body parts in the lower regions, whether it’s textured lips that protrude from the centre of a looping maze, or reproductive representations that radiate like colourful echoes from a pulsating centre.
Freud would have started by blaming the parents, of course, so that’s where we begin our story. Hollowell grew up in a liberal household, to a painter-professor father and a political-cartoonist mother, and she found herself in the studio from a very young age.
Dad was fond of creating imagined settings populated by both humans and objects, for fun Mom made outlandish clothing, and their home played host to all sorts of Northern Californian artsy, academic types. Hollowell’s first serious paintings were landscapes, scenes she saw around the house she grew up in, before she graduated to figurative works that got progressively more abstract and “cartoony” before losing their formal shape altogether.
From early on, the body was an integral part of her practice. “I was always painting figures of my family,” she says when I meet her before the opening of her exhibition at Pace Gallery in Hong Kong, “or of me, or my ex-boyfriends, or paintings of me, like, looking at my vagina in the mirror, or like my face is turned this way looking at my vagina, then another face kind of turned this way. It was much more kind of surrealist, but figurative.”
Why the body? “I guess it was trying to create narrative, you know, trying to tell a very specific story, so then leaving the body, leaving direct representation was a way for me to have a more universal conversation. Like actually using the figure, even in a surrealist context, was very didactic, you know, and that’s a conversation that I feel like is very important to painting’s history. That’s how we’ve used the language of painting to tell stories, through the figure. But for me, I wanted the conversation to be much more universal, and more about experiencing the painting, rather than the painting telling you what to experience. With my work now, I want you to create your own experience.”
It’s a direction that has been welcomed by gallerists and collectors alike. Hollowell put together her first major solo show in 2015 at 106 Green, an artistrun space in Brooklyn, and for her sophomore effort showed at the now-defunct but respectable Feuer/Mesler. By her third show, she’d been picked up by bigleague name Pace – the art-world equivalent of going from the flea market to selling at Harrods or Barneys, within a two-year time frame.
Her first exhibition with Pace opened in late September of 2017 and when Frieze London rolled around in October, she was the name on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Bloomberg reported that within the first 40 minutes of the preview opening, the exhibition pieces sold out, not to mention the works Pace had shipped into the UK for the fair.
While Hollowell falls neatly into a hot niche now – that of early- to mid-career young female artists who are putting their own stamp on the subversion of traditional formal techniques – it’s easy beyond that to see why she’s become an artworld darling. As a personality, she’s the kind of whimsical bohemian type it’s easy to connect with, radiating a gift of positivity and peace. But her work is also technically captivating, strikingly
“IT COMES FROM A BIOGRAPHICAL PLACE, BUT THE EXPERIENCE I WANT YOU TO HAVE IS A UNIVERSAL ONE”
articulate and has an appeal that’s not only universal, but envelopingly so.
“You’d have to ask [Pace president Marc Glimcher] why he picked me up,” Hollowell muses. “For a long time no one knew who I was, so when they would see my work I think they responded to the colours, and they responded to the texture, and to the organic-ness of it.
Even though it was grounded in a very geometric abstract language, they felt the bodily-ness of it. At least that’s what I’m remembering people telling me. Like when
Marc first saw my work, I think he was responding to that very bodily, natural, almost like a landscape element, which is what the work is based in. I mean I do think that here, and in the States, there’s a very low representation of women in the major galleries, and I think that they should be always picking up more and more women. And older women, but also younger women who have proven themselves.”
Hollowell’s sales records have certainly done much to prove her worth. By March of this year, Pace was trotting out Hollowell’s work again, this time at its Hong Kong space and during the critical Art Basel period (for context, the gallery concurrently opened two solo exhibitions that week, the other by another sort of up-andcoming artist by the name of Yoshitomo Nara).
Hollowell’s show, titled Switchback, featured nine paintings accompanied by an equal number of pastels, showed purposefully in juxtaposition to expose the technical process. “A lot of times I like the pastels way more than the paintings,” she says. “And I think in a lot of these the pastels actually work better than the paintings, colourwise. And they’re way better when they’re just hanging in my studio, not with glass in front of them. You can see the texture of the paper, and the pigment, it’s just really rich, super saturated. It’s [usually] just a relaxing space [before] my next body of work, which now ended up being a body of work. Because I would never have shown all of these.”
In the Switchback pieces, the anatomical references are still overt, and many works do exhibit a three-dimensionality that’s lost in images – lips protruding from the centre of “stacked lingams” – but they’re positioned to resemble mandalas, with an almost meditative quality.
“That’s what I wanted.” says Hollowell. “To not try to create some statement about the body, or feminism, or like penis meeting vagina. It’s just like, this is what it is, and I’ve made these images, this linked lingam and that stacked lingam, the same composition, for the past, like, five years. I started them five years ago, and after every group of ideas I have, once I get them out, then I go back here. And so I was just doing these by myself and then this big event is happening with the gallery, so they convinced me to make more of them and make a show of them.”
There may be a Zen vibe to many of these works, but that isn’t always the starting point. “The first body of work I started, I’d just had an abortion. I was in my late twenties, I had an abortion, and that experience, emotionally and physically, was very contradictory. Emotionally I was really upset, because I didn’t like the person I was with, and he was very aggressive, but physically it was fine, physically it was just, ‘Wow, that was easy.’ But it was also just, like, I felt this release, and all the hormones started going away, and it just felt like an explosion of freedom, but then emotionally it was really tumultuous, because I wanted it, he didn’t, blah blah blah. So I made paintings about that experience. And they were all small portraits of different stages of my vagina. They were very abstract landscapes that were very clearly related to some parts of the body.”
The body, Hollowell believes, will always figure in her work. “There’s nothing else that it would ever come from,” she says, simply. “The message is freedom of your vagina. Just no matter if you have sex with women, or men, or both, or whatever you have sex with, and you have a vagina, just let it be free. The images I’m making, they’re not only paintings of pleasurable times, but painful experiences too. When you’re having your period, and you have the cramps, paintings about abortion, paintings about pregnancy. I’m trying to get pregnant so I’m making a bunch of ideas now right after I’ve done these, what it’s like trying to get pregnant.
“It comes from a biographical place, but the experience I want you to have is a universal one. Like it doesn’t have to be my body, or my husband’s body. Like, the little triangular parts in these paintings in the show are little vaginas. They’re my vagina, but it doesn’t have to be my vagina. It doesn’t even have to be a vagina, really.”