Art Review / Blog Analysis
The astonishing career that this 36 years old artist has is very impressive,
she is considered one of the most successful young artists in New York
and part of the “hot-artist wave,” her paintings sold out in under 40 minutes.
She gave birth not a long ago and made this new collection inspired by her
body during the period of pregnancy and post partum. She creates very
centralized, colorful and abstract paintings. She is compared to Hilma af
Kint, Judy Chicago and especially with Georgia O’Keeffee. Those artists
depicted geometric shapes to represent spiritual communication or more
organic shapes to make reference to female genitalia or sex. The way she
describes her work as sexual inspirations from her life with her husband
and her pregnancy show the open relationship she has 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. The vagina is represent as an almond or
a Mandorla (Italian name for almond ) and became a frequent shape in her
paintings. 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 is to
trust the idea and go through with it. She makes 6-9 sketches and colors
them with pastel as a final piece. The pastels are a part of Hollowell’s
process and include notes in the margins to guide her as she works, which
she will come back and use during the whole process of creation. Then she
scans the image into a Rhinocesor computer program and uses them as a
model for a sculpture. From the rhino she prints the foam shapes and
someone helps her glue the material onto the canvas which is already
prepared and stretched with an excellent linen. After gluing she puts gesso
on these 3-D high-density foam pieces and then she starts painting, after
the paints she adds a type of beeswax to add volume and expands the
medium mixed with oil paint, afterwards she sands it until the piece
acquires a matte finishing. The artist lavished considerable attention on the
flat side of a circle sliced in half which she painted with a sponge to
produce tiny, gleaming peaks those shapes appear in each of the paintings
in display. She uses visible brushstrokes, sometimes loose and sometimes
tight, that arise from the circular motion Hollowell uses to blend paint.
Her trajectory was a MFA in Virginia and when she moved to NYC she met
several friends and hung out with them. She was inspired by modern India
artists with neotantric influence such as the Neotantric Indian painter
Gulam Rasool Santoosh. 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 (David and Terry Hollowell),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 finish a work is to achieve an
enlightened state, 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 then puts it in the IPad to play
with the image, altering colors or also alters it in photoshop.
The composition is very symmetrical and she said the body is symmetrical
and she chooses to make the canvas in a human size proportion. She
received criticism for the mass production of her art because of her 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 on the 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. The show’s titular
“plumb line,” a weighted cord used to establish a vertical axis, is mirrored in
the human spine.
She doesn’t have a favorite work so far, but she decide to keep one for
herself.
Each one of those canvases are already sold for $100,000.00 each and
she has a waiting list of 150 people. She also produced a monotype of
printmaking with the help of Pace printmakers workshop. The process was
very creative and the prints actually achieved a very close vibrancy output
of her work. Each print made is unique and both were sold at the beginning
of her show. She also has a waiting list for the prints and each of them
were sold for 16,500.00.
Photo: Melissa Goodwin, Courtesy of Pace Gallery
Loie Hollowell, Birthing Dance, 2018. Oil paint, acrylic medium, sawdust, and high density foam on linen mounted on panel, 72 x 54 x 3 1/2 inches. © Loie Hollowell. Courtesy Pace Gallery
I went across to the pastel that Loie Hollowell does before painted and I could see the notes that she makes in the pastels to keep track during the process of development them into a final piece. Those pieces are being exhibited at – the flag art foundation – 545 west 25 th street 9 floor.
Bibliography
http://nymag.com/tags/art/
https://brooklynrail.org/
