Loie Hollowell

These works mark a perspective shift in Hollowell’s practice and underscore her interest in the relationship between shifting scales of consciousness. The presentation follows her first retrospective, Loie Hollowell: Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years, which was held at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut, in 2024 and traveled to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2025.

The Overview Effect paintings are named after the term used by astronauts to describe the experience of seeing Earth from space, and the profound, transcendental feelings of awe and connection to others that it can produce.

The series continues Hollowell’s study of the births of her two children. An earlier body of work, the Split Orb paintings, arose from her first delivery, which took place in the hospital. Hollowell found the experience mentally and physically difficult, feeling as if her mind and body were being split open. Following her second labor, this time at home in a birthing tub, Hollowell began the Overview Effect paintings. They describe the sensations of that birth and the transcendence she felt when, during the brief moments between each contraction, she observed herself and the process from outside her body, as if from above. Both bodies of work use expanding concentric lines to depict the energy and emotion that radiates from the birthing body.

Each Overview Effect painting features two sculptural orbs arranged vertically, whose concentric ripples intersect to create a horizontal mandorla between them. The orbs—either convex, protruding an inch from the canvas, or concave, sinking an inch into it—recall the pregnant and empty belly, or planetary systems in synchronized orbit. Functioning as nesting dolls, they could, in theory, fit into one another if the painting were folded at the central mandorla, affirming the inherent unity of mother and child.

The pulsating colors in Hollowell’s paintings both describe throbbing bodily motion and exist in their own experiential world. She sets reds, yellows, and blues against muted tonalities of mauvy, grayish, fleshy purples, as if the active primary hues register moments of sharp human pain and euphoria within an infinite, weightless cosmic ocean. This dichotomy is echoed in the paintings’ compositional logic and Hollowell’s painterly touch. From afar, they express luminous mathematical precision; up close, tangles of swirling, textured mark-making suggest another microscopic realm of awareness. Just as Hollowell draws an affinity between the vastness of space and the fragility of new life, she also explores shifting scales of consciousness through formal techniques.

The first paintings Hollowell made for this series, exhibited at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery in 2024, included her largest works to date, expanding the canvas beyond her natural arm’s reach. For the London show, she has returned to a more human size; measuring 6 feet high by 4.5 feet wide, this is the scale at which Hollowell feels most comfortable. At this size, she is able to explore a wider range of color states in greater detail and complexity. Of the seven paintings in the exhibition, the first three explore the primary colors as seen through twilight or morning mist; their energy is understated and soft. The second two paintings she made delve into a frenetic noon intensity. Influenced by her native California, they register the sun’s reflection on ocean waves and manzanita, poppy, and yarrow covered hills. The final two works she painted for this exhibition investigate the quality of light at dusk in tonally deep, primary-adjacent hues.