Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years

Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years is Loie Hollowell’s first museum survey and first museum presentation on the East Coast. The work includes paintings and works on paper made across a decade, the debut of new pastel drawings and paintings that incorporate life casts of pregnant breasts and bellies, as well as never-before-exhibited works on paper from the artist’s archive. On view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU from September 6, 2024 to March 9, 2025

This exhibition tracks the development of Hollowell’s visual language over 10 years, a vocabulary that bridges abstraction with figuration, autobiography with art history, and biology with emotion. Orbiting two centuries of pioneering women artists who span generations and movements from Abstraction to Surrealism to 1960s Light and Space art, including Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Judy Chicago, Hollowell also cites Neo-Tantric painting as an important influence. Hollowell’s approach always begins with her own body as a guide to appraise seismic issues from sexual freedom to feminism, as well as reproductive rights and motherhood.

This survey considers time as material and theme. Hollowell turns the body into a metaphorical clock, documenting extreme intervals of change through dramatic chiaroscuro, saturated color, and charged light. Her labor-intensive process begins with a pastel drawing. She makes notes in the margins indicating how to translate her vision into a painting. Her sentient compositions are then built with geometric and biomorphic forms evocative of bellies, breasts, vulva, and buttocks that abstract the physical and emotional transformations she experienced throughout conception, birth, and postpartum with her two children. Her paintings are endowed with dimensional relief, achieved by adhering CNC-milled, high-density foam or cast-resin appendages to the surfaces to impersonate fleshy bulges and curves. These protrusions, which vary in depth, soften the works’ rigid two-dimensionality and evade the line between painting and sculpture to confront the viewer with visceral beauty. She uses a palette that glows, throbs, and blazes, a luminescent progression of reds, blues, yellows, oranges, greens, pinks, and purples, that vaunt a mercurial tempo from tender to explosive. Applying a rigorous symmetry in reference to the human body, she choreographs the energies and emotions that come from the mental and physical, with an emphasis on the birthing body: the epicenter of the universe, where the lower and higher realms intersect.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum monograph, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and featuring an essay by the curator Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years is organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

The exhibition is coordinated at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU by Interim Executive Director, Chase Westfall.

The exhibition’s presentation at the ICA at VCU is made possible by generous support from:
Pam Royall

VCU Foundation

Jay Barrows
Jim Klaus

Philip and Kay Davidson
Anne and Gus Edwards
John and Deborah Kemper
Ashley Kistler
Sharon Larkins-Pederson and Edson Pederson
Margaret Lewis
Celia Rafalko
Caroline and Richard Wright