RIDGEFIELD, CT — The work of an internationally exhibited abstract artist will have its first East Coast museum survey and presentation at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, beginning Jan. 21.
Loie Hollowell’s work has intrigued and delighted gallery-goers from Arkansas to Paris, Hong Kong to London. The survey at The Aldrich tracks Hollowell’s muse over a decade — the New York City-based artist calls it an “early career retrospective.”
Hollowell’s early efforts were heavily influenced by the neo-Tantric paintings of Kashmiri artist G. R. Santosh.
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“I took a lot of influence from the way he kind of broke apart the body and had it move within the canvas in an abstract way,” she told Patch.
Visitors to The Aldrich will find a lot of Georgia O’Keefe in Hollowell’s organics, especially in her early oils. She also cites Robert Irwin and Judy Chicago among her influences.
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Over time, Hollowell’s soft abstractions had begun to evolve into a sharper geometry, but life has a way of making other plans, even for muses.
“Over the past three years, after I gave birth to my second child, I started incorporating body casts into the work from my pregnant belly and pregnant breasts,” she explained, “and so the work has gone back to being kind of biomorphic, and less hard-edged.”
The casts incorporated onto her canvases include bellies, breasts, vulva, and buttocks, an abstraction of “the physical and emotional transformations she experienced throughout conception, birth, and postpartum, with her two children,” according to The Aldrich website.
The dimensional relief of Hollowell’s lady part paintings are sometimes larger than life: a cast of a pregnant belly in one piece extends about seven inches off the canvas.
“I’m really interested in how something can both function as a painting and a sculpture, like the subtle kind of transitions that you get when you walk around it,” she explained.
Hollowell’s coloring outside the lines began around 10 years ago, when she started adding sawdust to her paints to create a thick acrylic paste. She said she wanted to have “real” light, not just its painted-on surrogate, hitting a sculpted object on the surface of the canvas. Since then, her incorporation of three-dimensionality into her paintings has, well, ballooned. She now regularly incorporates high-density foam or cast-resin appendages to the surfaces of her paintings to impersonate fleshy bulges and curves.
“As a painter, I want to figure out how to create the light, I want to figure out how to use paint to make light sing even more.”
Adding that third dimension can be a heavy lift. The California-born artist said it typically takes upwards of three months to a year to get a painting to the point where she can actually paint on it.
Looking ahead to the next leg of her career, Hollowell said she plans to go large.
“I’m going to try making eight-foot paintings. These will be the biggest paintings I’ve ever made.”
She described the move as “very technical, very labor-intensive,” making it very in-character and very on-point with the first decade of her career.
“Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years” opens Jan. 21 at The Aldrich and will exhibit through Aug. 11, 2024. The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum monograph, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., featuring an essay by Amy Smith-Stewart, chief curator at The Aldrich.
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