Stepping across the threshold of Pace Gallery in the heart of London, you are met with both a vast cosmic void and a deeply familiar, intimate bodily rhythm. Loie Hollowell, one of the boldest names in contemporary painting, draws viewers into the uncanny waters of labor pains, physical fissures, and transcendence in “Overview Effect,” her first solo exhibition in the UK since 2018. The artist pours the agonizing experience of transcending the body’s limits onto the canvas with geometric precision and tactile brutality.
A Cosmic Void Amidst the Pain: The “Overview Effect”
The term “Overview Effect,” which gives the exhibition its name, describes the profound, jarring sense of awe and universal connectivity experienced by astronauts when looking back at Earth from space. Hollowell takes this immense, celestial concept and places it directly into a birthing pool—at the most primal moment of the human body.
Followers of Hollowell’s practice will recall her Split Orb series, which recounted the grueling hospital birth of her first child. That series was dominated by a sense of splitting between body and mind, characterized by sharp pain and fragmentation. However, the experience of delivering her second child at home in a birthing pool was entirely different. In this new series, Hollowell depicts the state of stepping outside her own body during those brief, silent moments between intense contractions—watching the process as if from above. It is that extraordinary transcendence and surrender standing right alongside the pain.
Sculptural Canvases: Complementary Void and Fullness
Each painting in the exhibition consists of two vertically aligned massive spheres. The concentric ripples these spheres create on the canvas surface intersect in the center to form a horizontal mandorla. The secret lies in the physical relationship these spheres establish with the surface: while one sphere protrudes outward from the canvas, the other recedes inward.
This state of protrusion and recession symbolizes a pregnant belly and the sudden subsequent emptiness, while also evoking planetary systems rotating in synchronized orbits. Thanks to Hollowell’s flawless mathematics, if you were to fold the canvas in half at the central mandorla, these two spheres would fit perfectly inside one another like a Matryoshka doll. A more elegant formal tribute to the unshakable physical integrity of mother and child could hardly be imagined.
A Chronology of Color: From Morning Mist to Twilight
The artist has moved away from the massive, larger-than-arm-span scales used in her Los Angeles exhibition last year, returning to a human scale (approximately 180 x 135 cm) that feels most comfortable to her for this series. This size allows her to play with much more complex and detailed color transitions.
When viewed from a distance, the works appear as a perfect mathematical play of light; however, as you approach, you are shaken by the swirly, microscopic texture formed by thick brushstrokes. The seven paintings in the exhibition also present a chromatic timeline:
- The First Three Works: Explore primary colors filtering through morning mist or dawn; their energies are remarkably soft and introspective.
- The Next Two Works: Carry the relentless, feverish intensity of the midday sun. The harsh, searing light that hits the ocean waves, manzanita bushes, poppies, and yarrow of the artist’s native California is reflected on the canvas. The pinnacle of pain and ecstasy.
- The Final Two Works: Close with the deep, dark, and melancholic tones of sunset that graze the primary colors.
Hollowell resolves the connection between the freezing magnitude of the universe and the fragility of a newborn life through a flawless mathematics of color and texture. The exhibition continues until May 23. We are in the month of May; these are your final weeks to witness this perfect geometry of body, color, and cosmos.
- Exhibition: Overview Effect
- Artist: Loie Hollowell
- Venue: Pace Gallery, London
- Dates: Running until May 23, 2026
