Overview Effect: Loie Hollowell
Pace is pleased to present Overview Effect, an exhibition of new paintings by Loie Hollowell, at its Los Angeles gallery. On view from November 9, 2024 to January 18, 2025, this will be the artist’s first solo presentationin Southern California, showcasing six of her largest works to date, each measuring eight by six feet, along with twonew, intimately scaled, multi-part nipple paintings. Overview Effect follows Hollowell’s solo exhibition at the AldrichContemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut—her first museum survey and first museum presentation onthe East Coast, now on view at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art through March 9,2025—and her recent show at Pace’s New York gallery, Dilation Stage.
Her upcoming exhibition in LA takes its title from what astronauts describe as the “overview effect”—the experienceof seeing Earth from space. From that vantage point, the planet becomes a unified whole without borders or boundaries, a single system of which humanity is a tiny part.
In her new Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell gives viewers a bold first impression: searing our retinas with the force of bright color, extreme lighting, symmetry, and strong geometries that take on larger-than-life proportions. Stare for a while, and you will feel the paintings’ lasting effects as afterimages linger over your field of vision and leave a psychic mark. The limited palette in this body of work, based on primary colors and their combinations, suggests something basic and elemental floating in the cosmic soup.
But looking longer and closer, something else happens—a tension between strict compositional order and localized mark-making, between overall tightness and areas of looseness, between mathematical precision and hand-painted, jumbled chaos. The dynamic between these contradictory aspects is complex, with stability containing instability, symmetry and geometry emerging from entropy. This rapport between the overview effect and the works’ up-close details depends on proximity. What appear from a distance as luminous orbs, celestial bodies, and blended colors shift into new focus as tangles of swirling, frenetic lines that imply hidden dimensions zip through our own frequencies and pass undetected through this field of existence.
Hollowell’s twisted, kinky mark-making captures states and sensations of heightened energy. The calligraphic looping of her lines implies a deeper relationship with writing and communication, reminding us that the primary aim of her aesthetic project is to record a subjective, bodily experience of feeling. The Overview Effect paintings depict two identically sized orbs stacked vertically with concentric ripples that intersect to form a horizontal mandorla. Here, Hollowell uses abstraction to capture the brief moments and breaks between contractions during childbirth, which can be a simultaneously out-of-body experience and a thoroughly visceral, embodied one. In each of these paintings, one orb bulges out while the other is a cavity—they could nest inside one another, like a hand or mouth cupped over a breast or like a child filling a pregnant mother’s belly.
In the gallery’s adjacent space, Hollowell will exhibit her rainbow suite of 16 small paintings, her smallest works to date, each spiked near the top with a protruding nipple cast from the bodies of her breastfeeding friends. Titled Spectrum XVI (an invocation of Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental Spectrum V) and spanning the full spectrum of color— from blue to green, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, and back to blue—this multi-part work is an exercise in both smooth transitions and stark contrast. A “milking line” drops straight down from each raised nipple, sharply delineating a bright highlight on the left and a dark shadow on the right. A fold, a crease, a pleat, a peak: the nipple designates a dividing line and a kind of crucible of intense chroma. The plumb line conjures the glowing, revolving arm of a radar map while connoting the time- keeping function and cyclicality of a sundial. As in the Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell’s technical prowess produces confusing and captivating trompe-l’oeil illusions that both hyperbolize and complicate real dimensionality.
The juxtaposition of these groups of paintings in Hollowell’s presentation in LA underscores her interest in shifting scales, from the micro to the macro and back again, from deep within oneself to far beyond it.
Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, raised in Woodland, California) is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. An investigation of autobiography became evident in Hollowell’s early work, which explored the use of gradient staining techniques on cotton supports as a metaphor for intimate spaces—meditations on sleep and bodily fluids. These canvases evolved into figurative painting, introducing female nudes as subject matter as well as the use of reflection and mirroring. Her subsequent work exhibited a shift toward abstraction, characterized by radiating silhouettes and a pulsating color palette. With its strong colors, varied textures, and geometrical symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of the Transcendental Painting Group (1938–1941), Georgia O’Keeffe, Gulam Rasool Santosh, and Judy Chicago.
Hollowell has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including, One opening leads to another, GRIMM Keizersgracht, Amsterdam (2019–2020); Recalibrate, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2021); Sacred Contract, Konig Galerie, Berlin (2021); Drawings as Urtext, The Anderson at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Richmond (2023). The artist’s first museum survey, Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years, is currently on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Her work has been included in over twenty group exhibitions including,10 Years Too Late, held at the Institut für Alles Mögliche, Berlin (2013); Mirror, Mirror, at the RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (2015); PaintersNYC, which opened at Páramo in Guadalajara, Mexico and traveled to El Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, Oaxaca, Mexico (2015). Hollowell was featured in After Effect, held at Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2016), and her work was included in Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, which opened in May 2018 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and traveled to the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, in 2019. Recently, her work has been included in Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022); Put It This Way: (RE)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2022–2023); Being in the World, Long Museum, Shanghai (2023); and x PINK 101, X Museum, Beijing.
Loie Hollowell has been represented by Pace since 2017. Her inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Point of Entry, was held at Pace Palo Alto the same year. Solo exhibitions of her work at the gallery include Switchback (2018); Dominant / Recessive (2018); Plumb Line (2019); Contractions (2022); Starting from 0 (2022); The Third Stage (2023); and Dilation Stage (2024).