Loie Hollowell

Artist

Loie Hollowell · loiehollowell.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/loie-hollowell ↗

Based

Born 1983, Woodland, California. Lives and works in New York City

Practice

Painting, drawing, relief, and generative art rooted in bodily experience, geometric symmetry, color, and light

Current

Included in Regift, Swiss Institute’s 40th-anniversary exhibition at Luma Westbau, Zürich, through September 6, 2026.⁹

In the set

Contractions ↗ · 280 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Loie Hollowell builds a visual language from experiences often excluded or idealized in art: sexuality, abortion, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, pleasure, and pain. Born in Woodland, California, in 1983, she studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Virginia Commonwealth University before establishing her practice in New York. Her paintings occupy a deliberately unstable zone between abstraction and representation. Orbs, mandorlas, clefts, and vertical axes can register simultaneously as formal geometry, bodily anatomy, and radiant cosmology.¹

The physical construction of those paintings is central to their meaning. Hollowell attaches shaped high-density foam and other relief elements to supports, producing surfaces on which actual illumination interacts with painted shadows and gradients. Art21 connects this manipulation of real and illusory light to her California upbringing, her artist parents, and the Light and Space movement.² The result is neither disembodied abstraction nor conventional self-portraiture. It is a body translated into pressure, symmetry, protrusion, color, and glow.

From bodily record to generative system

The vocabulary of Contractions emerged from Hollowell’s Split Orb paintings, which use paired rounded forms and radiating bands to evoke labor. In related physical works, openings within the lower orb correspond to cervical dilation, while shifts in color and spatial tension register changing intensities of pain.³ Hollowell’s 2024 survey placed this vocabulary within a decade-long development that joined autobiography to art history and biology to emotion. It also documented a process beginning with pastel drawings and extending into dimensional paintings made with CNC-milled foam or cast-resin appendages.⁴

Contractions, released through Art Blocks × Pace on October 28, 2022, consists of exactly 280 editions, a number chosen to reflect the average days in a full-term pregnancy.⁵ It was a co-branded release under Art Blocks’ Collaborations designation, which launched with Pace Verso in 2022.¹⁰ The system has 11 scene states: one pair of closed orbs for the final phase of pregnancy and ten progressively opened states corresponding to one through ten centimeters of cervical dilation. The upper orb represents the brain; the lower represents the pregnant belly and cervix. Hue, saturation, texture, shadow, and radiating rings vary across outputs, reorganizing Hollowell’s recurring forms as a generative system rather than reproducing her paintings as static digital images.⁵ Each edition becomes a distinct negotiation between bodily reference and computational possibility.

Hollowell described the collaboration as an education in relinquishing control. She initially constrained the palette to muted flesh tones, reds, magentas, and purples, then accepted neon greens, oranges, and other colors difficult to realize in oil. She also emphasized digital shadows, rings, and emanating light as ways to suggest the emotional and physical force of birth without a three-dimensional object.⁶ Code therefore became less a neutral production tool than a means of testing how far her established language could expand.

Live on Art Blocks: contractions-by-loie-hollowell ↗

Abstraction as embodied testimony

Across the grid, repetition behaves like rhythm rather than replication. The paired forms remain recognizable, but changes in hue, glow, texture, shadow, and apparent pressure give each image a different emotional temperature. The editions can suggest breath cycles, waves of pain, dilation, or the alternation between concentration and release. Their serial structure also reframes the single monumental painting as a distributed field of related states.

This translation matters because Hollowell does not treat abstraction as an escape from lived experience. She has argued that childbirth was too intense and abstract to represent adequately through a literal body, while insisting that pregnancy and birth require more images made from both internal and external perspectives.⁷ Geometry supplies distance without erasure. It permits intimate testimony to become legible as shared sensation while retaining the specificity of its source.

The project also folds back into Hollowell’s studio practice. Pace reported that six paintings in her 2023 exhibition The Third Stage were inspired by editions minted through Contractions. The gallery further stated that 25 percent of net project proceeds supported Midwest Access Coalition and ARC-Southeast, organizations assisting people seeking reproductive care.⁸ The exchange between code and painting was therefore reciprocal: an existing relief vocabulary shaped the algorithm, and generated images subsequently became prompts for new physical works.

That exchange remains part of an active exhibition practice. As of July 2026, Hollowell’s work is on view in Regift, Swiss Institute’s 40th-anniversary exhibition at Luma Westbau in Zürich, through September 6, 2026.⁹

Within AB[500], Contractions marks a productive encounter between an established painter and generative art. Its significance rests not on converting painting into a digital collectible, but on exposing the artist’s grammar to multiplicity and chance. Across 280 editions, Hollowell’s bodily cosmology becomes a system that can surprise its author while remaining unmistakably her own.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Loie Hollowell links page ↗.