Loie Hollowell's Overview Effect Paintings at Pace London
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- Loie Hollowell's Overview Effect series is on view at London's Pace Gallery, featuring large-scale canvases with twin concave and convex sculpted circles that fit together perfectly when folded vertically and radiate outward in rings of vibrant, soothing color.
- Named after the term astronauts use to describe the awe of seeing Earth from space, the series coincides with the Artemis II moon mission and draws on Hollowell's 'cosmic' home birth of her daughter — a more empowering contrast to the difficult hospital birth of her son that inspired her earlier Split Orb paintings and Dilation Stage pastels.
- Downstairs at the gallery, more explicitly bodily pastel works with titles like Happy Vagina, Boob Wheel, and The Let Down trace the artist's thought processes across abortion, conception, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding.
- Hollowell cites Louise Bourgeois and Luchita Hurtado's birth paintings as major influences, alongside Ina May Gaskin's childbirth book and Instagram home-birth photographs, which she notes share the symmetrical, legs-spread compositional structure of her canvases.
- Born in 1983 in Woodland, California, the artist says she only recently became able to openly discuss how an abortion she had influenced earlier works — a shift she credits to female curators placing her in museum shows and to (often male) collectors growing more comfortable with her image-making.
- Now in perimenopause, Hollowell says she feels 'in control' in a way she hasn't before and expects her art to change again, noting that her favorite artists 'blossomed in their 50s and 60s' and that she could not have made this work 20 years ago while also being a mother.
Why it matters: By openly naming birth, abortion, and breastfeeding as direct influences on her abstract canvases, Hollowell is dismantling the long-standing expectation that great abstraction must transcend the body — a shift she credits to female curators who placed her in museum shows and to collectors becoming more comfortable with her image-making over time.
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