Meeting with artist Loie Hollowell at PACE Gallery
The astonishing career that this 36 years old artist has had is very impressive. She is compared to Hilma af Kint, Judy Chicago and especially with Georgia O’Keeffee. The way she describes her work as sexual inspirations from her life with her husband and her pregnancy showed an open relationship with the viewer. She used five body parts to express her art: the head, the boob, the belly, the vagina and the butt and reflected her abstract work, geometric painting language, to talk about the body. She also used her pregnant forms to incorporate in her compositions. I really was put into a meditative mood while looking through her work and that for me is spiritual practice. Loie Hollowell evokes body shapes into a landscape journey using geometric shapes to move the colors into abstraction.
During Hollowell’s meeting she described the hardest part for the artist’s way is to trust the idea and go through with it . She makes 6-9 sketches and colors them with pastel as a final piece then she scans the image into Rhinocesor computer program and makes them a 3D model for sculpture. From the rhino she prints the foams shapes and someone helps her gluing the material onto the canvas which is already prepared and stretched with an excellent Linen. After gluing she puts gesso and then she start painting , after the paint she adds a type of bees wax and sands it until the piece has a matt finishing.
Her trajectory was a MFA in Virginia and when she moved to NYC she met several friends and hung out with them. She takes a look at Modern India artists with neo tantric influence . We could see the focus on body parts and expressing sensuality through abstract shapes. She feels the connecting between her art and spirituality through the process of making and not in the moment of choosing colors or shapes. Color and light is in the central element. Spirituality is in the practice of making art. She was influenced by her parents who are also artists, her father’s work is pointillist and realistic. She focuses on texture, composition, space, color, the blend of light to dark and to finished a work is to achieve a enlightenedstate, a transcendent feeing. She listens to Pod casts while working and not music. When she gets frustrated or stuck she goes back to drawing and takes a picture of the image and puts it in the IPad to play with the image, altering colors or also alters it in photoshop.
The composition is very symmetric and she said the body is symmetric and now she chooses to make the canvas in a human size proportion. She received criticism for the mass production of her art because of hiring people to do part of her work.
The way she chooses the title is a process that starts at the moment she is drawing and making notes , while painting onthe canvas the drawings come back to the wall and some ideas of titles appear and by the time the piece is finished the title might have changed a couple of times.
She conceived her exhibition in a very meticulous way and worked together with Pace Gallery to find the best light to influence the view. The gallery has a system of different options of color that the artist can choose from. In the case of that exhibition she chose orange in the outside and blue in the middle to create the light she has in her studio. She made the outline of the display using another program sketch and decided how to organize the displaying of the canvas and how to play with light.
She doesn’t have a favorite work so far, but she decide to keep the this one for herself.
Each one of those canvases are already sold for $100,000 each and she has a waiting list of 150 people.
Drew Art Semester – Also at Pace Gallery
Calder
He not suggest movement but he capture it. All his pieces have movement and some of the installations can produce different types of noises with the human interaction. His work is fluid , dynamic and very elegant. He plays with balance and movement in abstract forms.
