Loie Hollowell

Loie Hollowell was born in 1983 in Woodland, California, and raised in Northern California. She earned her BFA in painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005 and her MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. After finishing her graduate studies she moved to New York City, where she began showing in group exhibitions at venues including the Edward Thorp Gallery and the Drawing Center. Her first solo exhibition, Lost, was held at the National Gallery of Saskatchewan in 2008.

Hollowell's early work was largely abstract; over the course of the 2010s she developed a signature hard-edge painting technique, building sharp-edged, symmetrical compositions that increasingly incorporated raised, sculptural paint surfaces to render bodily forms, pregnancy, and sexuality in a geometric, almost diagrammatic language. Earlier in her career she received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship in 2011 and, in 2013, a Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts summer residency and a Queens Arts Fund grant from the Queens Council on the Arts.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai, and at the Anderson at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, her graduate alma mater. In 2026 Pace Gallery mounted Overview Effect at its London gallery, her first UK solo presentation since 2018, featuring large-scale paintings that use the astronaut's-eye view of Earth as a metaphor for the sensations of childbirth. She continues to live and work in New York.

Critics place Hollowell within a lineage that runs from Georgia O'Keeffe's body-as-landscape abstraction through Judy Chicago's feminist geometric imagery, while noting her distinct debt to tantric painting traditions, which she has cited directly as an influence on her symmetrical, mandala-like compositions. Reviewers have highlighted her use of sculpted, raised paint surfaces, which push her canvases toward relief and give her flattened, diagrammatic bodies an unexpected physical presence. Institutional attention has built steadily since her 2008 debut, and the Aldrich's ten-year survey in 2024, her first East Coast museum survey, has been read as validation of a young practice maturing quickly rather than a flash in the pan.

Hollowell's auction record is Standing in Red (2019), which sold for HKD 17,990,000 (about USD 2.29 million) at Sotheby's Hong Kong on April 5, 2023, roughly 200 percent above its high estimate of HKD 7 million. The result set a new high for the artist and came amid a broader run-up in her secondary-market prices between 2021 and 2023, a period in which several of her works achieved records in successive sales in Hong Kong and New York. She is represented by Pace Gallery and by Jessica Silverman.

Hollowell's market is thin by the standards of a blue-chip artist, which means individual auction results can move sharply on a single strong or weak sale. Her rapid price appreciation between 2021 and 2023 is the kind of pattern collectors should treat with discipline: a short track record and a small number of public sales make any given result a noisy signal rather than a stable baseline. She has no catalogue raisonne or certificate-of-authenticity program, so provenance and gallery documentation from Pace or Jessica Silverman are the primary means of verification.