Loie Hollowell (born 1983) is an American painter. She was born and raised in Northern California. She currently lives and works in New York City.
Hollowell creates abstract biomorphic paintings that suggest spirituality and sexuality. Hollowell's work is inspired by tantric painting traditions, and she has been compared to the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. [1] [2]
Hollowell holds a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. [3]
Hollowell's paintings have been described as "abstract body landscapes" by Martha Schwendener of the New York Times. [4] Known for paintings and drawings that explore the bodily landscape, Loie Hollowell's practice exists in the liminal space between abstraction and figuration, otherworldly and corporeal. [5]
Originating in autobiography, her work explores themes of sexuality, pregnancy and birth. Hollowell's geometric compositions use symbolic shapes such as the mandorla, ogee and lingam to build her distinctive visual lexicon. In referencing her own personal experiences, Hollowell's paintings are at once personal and universal in their fierce vulnerability. Her use of symmetry - often anchoring her compositions in a central, singular axis - relates her paintings to her own body as well as the natural world. [6]
For Hollowell, the scale of her work is particularly significant as she creates each work in direct correlation with the size of the body part depicted, be it her head, breasts, groin, or entire body. Furthering her exploration of physicality, Hollowell adheres sculpted forms onto her canvases to confound expectations of painting. Hollowell’s protruding forms are blended seamlessly, forcing the viewer to move around the canvas to determine whether it is an illusory flat surface or three-dimensional. This adds a playful, performative aspect to her work that speaks to Hollowell’s masterful manipulation of space, surface, light and shadow. [7]
With strong colors, varied textures, and geometric symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of American artists like Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe and Judy Chicago. She is also greatly influenced by the work of the California Light and Space Movement as well as Neo-Tantric painters like Ghulam Rasool Santosh and Biren De. [8]
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
Precisionism was a modernist art movement that emerged in the United States after World War I. Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and suggest the sleekness and sheen of machine forms. At the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, Precisionism celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called "Cubist-Realism." The term "Precisionism" was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr although according to Amy Dempsey the term "Precisionism" was coined by Charles Sheeler. Painters working in this style were also known as the "Immaculates", which was the more commonly used term at the time. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists.
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American painter and visual artist active primarily in New York whose work has been associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.
Jane Schenthal Frank was an American multidisciplinary artist, known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, illustrator, and textile artist. Her landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings are included in public collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She studied with artists, Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg.
Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist, much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality. Her most notable body of work involves highly layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.
Irene Rice Pereira was an American abstract artist, poet and philosopher who played a major role in the development of modernism in the United States. She is known for her work in the genres of geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction, as well as her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school. Her paintings and writings were significantly influenced by the complex intellectual currents of the 20th century.
Beatriz Milhazes is a Brazilian artist. She is known for her work juxtaposing Brazilian cultural imagery and references to western Modernist painting. Milhazes is a Brazilian-born collage artist and painter known for her large-scale works and vibrant colors. She has been called "Brazil's most successful contemporary painter."
Carrie Moyer is an American painter and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Moyer's paintings and public art projects have been exhibited both in the US and Europe since the early 1990s, and she is best known for her 17-year agitprop project, Dyke Action Machine! with photographer Sue Schaffner. Moyer's work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Tang Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She serves as the director of the graduate MFA program at Hunter College, and has contributed writing to anthologies and publications like The Brooklyn Rail and Artforum.
Edna Andrade was an American abstract artist. She was an early Op Artist.
Trudy Benson is an American abstract painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Mary Corse is an American artist who lives and works in Topanga, California. Fascinated with perceptual phenomena and the idea that light itself can serve as both subject and material in art, Corse's practice can be seen as existing at an crossroads between American Abstract Expressionism and American Minimalism. She is often associated with the male-dominated Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, although her role has only been fully recognized in recent years. She is best known for her experimentation with radiant surfaces in minimalist painting, incorporating materials that reflect light such as glass microspheres. Corse initially attended University of California, Santa Barbara starting in 1963. She later moved on to study at Chouinard Art Institute, earning her B.F.A. in 1968.
Ulrike Müller is a contemporary visual artist. Müller is a member of the New York-based feminist genderqueer group LTTR as well as an editor of its eponymous journal. She also represented Austria at the Cairo Biennale in 2011. She is currently a professor and co-chair of Painting at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Sharon Gold is an American artist and associate professor of painting at Syracuse University. Gold's artwork has been installed at MoMA PS1, Dia Art Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Everson Museum of Art, and Princeton University Art Museum. She was a fellow at MacDowell Colony. Gold's work has been reviewed by Arthur Danto, Donald Kuspit, Ken Johnson, and Stephen Westfall in a variety of publications from Artforum to the New York Times, New York Magazine, Arts Magazine, Art News, and many others. She also taught at Princeton University, Pratt Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Francisco Art Institute, and the Tyler School of Art. Gold received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and wrote for Re-View Magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G/S, and Artforum. Her artwork spans across minimalism, monochromatic abstraction, geometric abstraction, and representational painting and is conceptually informed by structuralism, existential formalism, and feminist theory.
Cy Gavin is an American artist, in paint, sculpture, performance art, and video, who lives and works in New York. Gavin has often incorporated unusual materials in his paintings such as tattoo ink, pink sand, diamonds, staples, and seeds.
Jackie Saccoccio was an American abstract painter. Her works, considered examples of gestural abstraction, featured bright color, large canvases, and deliberately introduced randomness.
Ethel Fisher was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Her work ranges across abstraction and representational genres including large-scale portraiture, architectural "portraits," landscape and still-life, and is unified by a sustained formal emphasis on color and space. After studying at the Art Students League in the 1940s, Fisher found success as an abstract artist in Florida in the late 1950s, and began exhibiting her work nationally and in Havana, Cuba. Her formative work of this period embraced the history of art, architecture and anthropology; she referred to it as "abstract impressionist" to distinguish her approach to form and color from that of Abstract Expressionism.
Pearl C. Hsiung is a Taiwan-born American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles.
Wendy Edwards is an American artist known for vibrant, tactile paintings rooted in organic forms and landscape, which have ranged from representation and figuration to free-form abstraction. Her work has been strongly influenced by the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement and its embrace of ornamentation, repetition, edge-to-edge composition, sensuality and a feminist vision grounded in women's life experience. Critics note in Edwards's paintings an emphasis on surfaces and the materiality of paint, a rhythmic use of linear or geometric elements, and an intuitive orientation toward action, response and immediacy rather than premeditation. In a 2020 review, Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid wrote, "Edwards's pieces are exuberant, edgy, and thoughtful ... [her] sweet, tart colors and delicious textures make the senses a gateway into larger notions about women and men, creation and mortality."
Summer Days is a 1936 oil painting by the American 20th-century artist Georgia O'Keeffe. It depicts a buck deer skull with large antlers juxtaposed with a vibrant assortment of wildflowers hovering below. The skull and flowers are suspended over a mountainous desert landscape occupying the lower part of the composition. Summer Days is among several landscape paintings featuring animal skulls and inspired by New Mexico desert O'Keeffe completed between 1934 and 1936.
Betsy Kaufman is a visual artist based in New York known for abstract paintings and works on paper, as well as needlepoint sculptures. Critics distinguish her work by its subversion of modernist systems and its insertion of strong emotion, humor, and narrative into geometric abstraction. Writer Ingrid Schaffner observed that Kaufman's paintings are "inherently based on disruption … She has made the accidents, oppositions, contradictions, and mercurialness, which most organizing impulses work hard to minimize, into the rationale that guides the unpredictable and forceful narrative of her abstractions." Kaufman has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne (France), Queens Museum of Art, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Germany) and the Tang Museum, among other venues.