What can also be missed is that the paintings have such presence, they practically hum. What is difficult to perceive until you’re in their physical presence is that forms protrude from the canvases.
The work also employs a mystical symbolism, and explores the relationship between depth, color, and dimensionality. The nine pieces she hung at Pace, for example, convey different elements of her recent pregnancy and childbirth. And while it engages broadly with what it means to inhabit a body, it’s always filtered through an expressly female lens. Today, her work remains informed by Georgia O’Keeffe but also Italian Futurists, neotantric Indian painters, and transcendentalists. But she began to shift toward more abstract forms after she had an abortion and wanted to make paintings about that experience.
“I painted a lot of vaginal plants,” she says.
Hollowell learned how to paint from her father, a retired professor of art at University of California, Davis, and initially focused her efforts on self-portraits and desert landscapes composed of personal symbols. Hollowell, sitting in her studio in Ridgewood, Queens, this past fall, a few feet from a plastic walker her toddler son sometimes uses to mosey around the space, sums up her response to learning she’d be featured in the inaugural shows as “Holy fuck.” (She gave birth nine months before the opening, and took just one month off before getting back to work.) Every piece sold before the show opened. But when it came time to decide whose work would be shown first in Pace’s new space, “We thought about who represents our future, and that’s Loie,” says Andria Hickey, the gallery’s senior director and curator. Just five years earlier, she was showing her paintings at artist-run galleries in Brooklyn and working as an art handler to pay the bills. In between was Plumb Line, a show by painter Loie Hollowell, 36, one of the youngest artists on Pace’s roster. When Pace gallery opened its 75,000-square-foot flagship in Chelsea last September, the ground-floor exhibit space was dedicated to sculptural titan Alexander Calder, while the third floor featured new drawings by the influential British artist David Hockney. Those pieces, after all, are constructed just like the rest. “Otherwise there’s nowhere for that conversation.” As for the photos in which she appears, “You might know what socks I was wearing when I had sex that one time, but I don’t feel exposed,” she says. “Which is a perfect example of #MeToo going wrong, because I’m a feminist artist, and we’re shaming this little girl for just acting like a little girl.” What Chetrit appreciates about the art world is that it offers her the opportunity “to be problematic as a way to address things that are problematic,” she says. “They decided that in this ‘Harvey Weinstein climate,’ they didn’t want to release pictures of her,” Chetrit says. “I was also a little girl.”Īnother unorthodox choice: incorporating into that same show a photograph she’d taken of a young girl for a Helmut Lang campaign that the brand nixed. “I wasn’t a 37-year-old photographing little girls,” Chetrit says. She was drawn to how those images captured a power dynamic that could no longer be achieved. “Where does the power lie in an image? What is the relationship between photographer and subject?” Those same inquiries drove Chetrit’s decision to include some of her early photos of friends in her Amateur show at Rome’s Maxxi Museum in 2018. gallery began representing Chetrit last spring. “She’s had consistent curiosities,” says Hannah Hoffman, whose eponymous L.A.
Since then, Chetrit, who now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, has produced a wide-ranging body of work that includes nude self-portraits, aerial shots of New York streets, and a series of her having sex with her now husband.Ī formal elegance characterizes her work, which often focuses on the interplay between illusion and truth. A few years in, though, “I realized I could kind of make up anything,” she says, and she began not just taking candid photos of friends but staging, say, murder scenes. At first, she often found herself thinking that if only her life were more interesting, her images would be better. Talia Chetrit set up a darkroom in her family’s Washington, DC, home when she was just 13.