The Brooklyn Rail

Loie Hollowell has been painting sex and pregnancy for the past decade. Over that time, her artistic approach to these subjects has transformed in ways that rely on her own felt experience of embodiment, and two exhibitions now on view, one at Pace Gallery and one at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, provide ample evidence of this fact. At Pace, she exhibits a suite of ten pastel drawings of swollen bellies, each atop a minute red circle whose circumference grows by a centimeter from work to work, representing the dilation of the cervix during childbirth; at the Aldrich, she presents a ten-year retrospective. The chronological presentation allows us to see that early on, around 2015, Hollowell seized upon a formula that she has used ever since, of sculpting some passages of each canvas in low relief—a blunted obelisk, a split sphere, a belly, a boob—and covering the whole composition in harmonious gradients of color. The works register simultaneously as depictions of the human body and as otherworldly landscapes in the tradition of early American modernism.

The great appeal, humor, and joy of beholding her abstractions lies in their polysemy: bouncing butts are also cleaved foothills (Yellow Mountains [2016]); the orbs of two swinging pendula are also, where they touch, the moment of conception (Balancing the Scale [2018]). Therefore, what we encounter is vulnerable but not saccharine, edgy but not vulgar, and this tension has made Hollowell something of a market darling. In her own words, the work is “porn for myself.” For the artist Clarity Haynes, who has a simultaneous show of paintings depicting the crowning stage of birth up at New Discretions, Hollowell’s work depicts the “body as it is felt from the inside.” The works’ technical proficiency is exceptional: she is an incredible colorist, and the paintings always retain the trace of her hand. All this is what has deservedly made Hollowell’s work well known, and it is what we have come to expect of her. This is no small feat for an artist who has pushed herself—hard—to paint ever larger and more sculptural work.

A retrospective is also an occasion to consider the work historically, in the context of art history and in our time. I cannot take this on fully in a short review, but it interests me that writers have tended to shy away from this task, even as Hollowell and others repeatedly suggest a host of important forebears, usually Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Judy Chicago, Hilma af Klint, and Ghulam Rasool Santosh. I would add Joan Semmel, Louise Bourgeois, and a few others. This grouping offers the thematics of (the Californian) landscape, spiritualism, feminist art, and American modernism as fertile grounds for interpretation. (As I write, the Aldrich exhibition catalogue is not yet available; perhaps these themes will be addressed there.) Moreover, the timing of Hollowell’s Aldrich show overlapped with Judy Chicago’s massive retrospective at the New Museum, and Hollowell’s Pace show opened several days after Chicago’s closed. This confluence makes it virtually impossible to ignore Hollowell’s critical engagement with the specific historical precedent of feminist art, and more specifically the debates around centralized imagery and visual pleasure hotly contested in the 1960s and ’70s. Importantly, women artists today know they have a history, as Mira Schor has pointed out, thanks to the artworks, writings, and consciousness-raising of this earlier generation.

Hollowell depicts desire in dick pics like Point of Entry (lingam between red circles) (2017), as well as those aspects of the reproductive life cycle that patriarchal society usually shields from view, such as the milk-emitting, sagging breasts of Let-Down (2022), whose title refers to the involuntary release of milk triggered by oxytocin. There is plenty of pain here, too, which the paintings embody, even as Hollowell seems able to wonder at it from within herself. Many of the boob paintings bear color palettes that I can’t help but think of as bruised. The chasm that runs straight upward through the body’s stacked circles in Split Orbs in blue, aqua and tan (2021) is visceral, like the searing pain of childbirth that actually does tear open the body. This suggests that feminist art history affords Hollowell a historical standpoint from which to reject the pleasure men in patriarchal society take in the representation of the female body, a foundation that her work has thoroughly internalized. Thus it is not the work’s primary task to counter the trope of nude women as ultimate exemplars of aesthetic beauty, a discourse Hollowell’s work easily turns back on itself. Note how closely Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on the sublime and the beautiful could be said to describe Hollowell’s paintings, yet how divergent the implications: “observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface…; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.”

Through abstracted mandorlas, cervixes, and labial folds, Hollowell also engages the centralized imagery of much 1970s feminist art. Yet, distant from the oppositional politics that governed those debates, she circumvents the essentialist critique of such imagery as biologically determined by showing that femininity is never static or fixed but rather fluid and contingent. One way this is evident is in the work’s increasing address of time’s passage and its impact on the body, which registers for the artist—and therefore in the work—as two pregnancies, two childbirths, many months of breastfeeding, and, looking ahead, the anticipation of menopause and aging. Another way is that recent works, beginning in 2022, spatialize the experience of time in a more systematic way than the swinging pendulums/balls/sperm of 2017, displacing a sole focus on the rhythms of the body by merging them with the external regulation of the clock’s hours. At the Aldrich, 10pm Feeding - Around the clock (2022) shows twelve breasts in relief arrayed as if on a clock, divided by a sharp line articulated in the contrast of sunlight and shadow. In a related multipartite work, 11pm, 1am, 3am, 5am, 7am, 9am (2023), that sculptural cliff that is the clock’s hand slices the canvas in half, terminating at the center of a nipple rendered with such sculptural fidelity that the areola’s minute wrinkles of skin are retained. Each work darkens progressively, from a peachy glow to midnight blue. This serial logic, which Mel Bochner called a “method, not a style,” is a newly ambitious direction in Hollowell’s practice that signals a conceptual shift toward processing experience with the less visceral eye of hindsight.

As Bochner noted of Edward Muybridge’s photographs in which the same event is pictured from different angles, Hollowell’s most recent work frames different points of view, as if we are also above looking down at something, rather than simply standing in front of it or looking into it. In an interview in these pages, Hollowell describes her current interest in the “overview effect” of seeing her body from above, as if from outer space. Overview Effect is also the title of a 2023 pastel on view at the Aldrich showing two crimson orbs whose radiating, pulsating rings meet to form a golden almond, like balls at rest in a puddle below. This perspectival shift is part of the structuring logic of the ten “Dilation Stage” pastel drawings at Pace, in which various elements imply three different positions in space: the pregnant stomach from the front, the circular red cervix from below (or inside), and the radiating rings of pain or water from above. By moving through the stages of dilation serially across ten works, like a schematic, and scrambling humanism’s default perspectival view, the “Dilation Stage” pastels construct a subject position that does not seem disclosed solely from an internal, first-person perspective. This widened point of view also extends to the gallery space itself, pointing to the ways that birth is socially and institutionally conditioned. At the center of the gallery sits a birthing bench that Hollowell and her husband, sculptor Brian Caverly, made collaboratively. The press release points out that the birthing chair’s history dates to ancient Egypt: it is a form that has witnessed, throughout human history, the effects of cultural conditions on the experience of childbirth.

The jewel of the Aldrich show is a small gallery of twenty exquisite drawings from 2013 to 2023. Among the earliest is a charcoal and graphite work called Emerald Mountain (2013) of a surging artichoke-like hill. Hollowell has said it was inspired by an abortion that “liberat[ed] my uterus” and set in motion the approach to abstraction that has come to define her practice. Such disclosures seem important because they defend the specificity of individual experience without accepting it as natural or inevitable, and they also point to the work’s political power in a current cultural and political climate that is increasingly antagonistic toward the choices women, queer, and trans people make about their lives. By surfacing how felt experiences of embodiment interface with our institutions, education, and intellectual histories, Hollowell does not just show us herself, as it were, but offers painting as an intellectual project that shows how viewed and viewing subjects are situated in space, time, and history.