Loie Hollowell
Blue Brain on flesh shoulders
Loie Hollowell (American, born 1983)
Blue Brain on flesh shoulders, 2025
Oil paint, acrylic medium, and high-density foam on linen over panel
48 x 36 x 3 1/2 in. (121.9 x 91.4 x 8.9 cm)
Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Gallery
Estimate: $400,000 - $500,000
Blue brain on flesh shoulders, 2025, was created for the Norton Gala 2026. Loie Hollowell's autobiographical paintings explore bodily landscapes, often as therapeutic exercises to process experiences in her own life. The Brain series specifically addresses a traumatic brain injury that affected her father David, a famous painter included in the Norton’s Collection. A full circle moment, this painting focuses on a simple palette and shape referencing a meditative focal point accessible to her father post-injury.
Signature to Hollowell’s work are sculptural elements adhered to the canvas — seen here as a single shelf at the lower edge of the work. The protruding form is blended seamlessly, confounding expectations of painting and forcing the viewer to move around the work to determine whether it is three-dimensional or an optical illusion.
About the Artist
Loie Hollowell (born, 1983, raised in Woodland, California) is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes, using geometric shapes to move a figure or its actions into abstraction. Her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. An investigation of autobiography became evident in Hollowell’s early work, which explored the use of gradient staining techniques on cotton supports as a metaphor for intimate spaces — meditations on sleep and bodily fluids. These canvases evolved into figurative painting, introducing female nudes as subject matter as well as the use of reflection and mirroring. Her subsequent work exhibited a shift toward abstraction, characterized by radiating silhouettes and a pulsating color palette. With its strong colors, varied textures, and geometrical symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of the Transcendental Painting Group, 1938 – 1941, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gulam Rasool Santosh, and Judy Chicago.
Hollowell has been the subject of numerous one-artist exhibitions including Recalibrate, Long Museum, Shanghai, 2021; Sacred Contract, König Galerie, Berlin, 2021; and Drawings as Urtext, The Anderson at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Richmond, 2023. The artist’s first museum survey, Space Between, A Survey of Ten Years, was held at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 2024. Her work has been included in over fifty group exhibitions including Mirror, Mirror, at the RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 2015; PaintersNYC, which opened at Páramo in Guadalajara, Mexico, and traveled to El Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2015. Hollowell was featured in After Effect, held at Ballroom Marfa, Texas, 2016, and her work was included in Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, which opened in May 2018 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and traveled to the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, in 2019. Recently, her work has been included in Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022; Put It This Way: (RE)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 2022 – 2023; Being in the World, Long Museum, Shanghai, 2023; x PINK 101, X Museum, Beijing, 2023; and The Infinite Woman, Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles Island, Var, France, 2024.
Her work is held in numerous public collections worldwide including The Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Arts Council Collection, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands; He Art Museum, Shunde, China; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and M+, Hong Kong among others.
Loie Hollowell has been represented by Pace since 2017. Her inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Point of Entry, was held at Pace Palo Alto the same year. One-artist exhibitions of her work at the gallery include Switchback, 2018; Dominant / Recessive, 2018; Plumb Line, 2019; Contractions, 2022; Starting from 0, 2022; The Third Stage, 2023; Dilation Stage, 2024; and Overview Effect, 2024 – 2025.
Gallery Profile | Artist's Website | Instagram
2026 Gala Auction Lots
Jeffrey Gibson | Julie Curtiss | Jessie Henson | Marilyn Minter
For more information, please email [email protected]
This lot will be auctioned live at the Gala on February 7, 2026. To register an absentee or phone bid, please email [email protected]