LOIE HOLLOWELL
SACRED CONTRACT

KÖNIG BERLIN
28 APRIL – 13 JUNE 2021

KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to present SACRED CONTRACT, the first solo exhibition with works by Loie Hollowell, in the Nave of St. Agnes.

Loie Hollowell has been described as a modern-day Georgia O’Keeffe with a dash of humor and a strong dose of female self-assertion. Hollowell has lived in New York City for many years, originally from California. Here, she has continuously worked to redefine a representation of the human shape and experience. Her vibrantly coloured canvases set their focus on the core subjects of life: relationships, sexuality, and femininity. While melding sculpture and painting through a combination of symmetrical forms and sculpted applications, Hollowell's paintings offer abstractions of the human body that speak of extreme vitality. In her most recent work, the artist focused on a quintessentially female experience: giving birth.

© Images by Roman März

In SACRED CONTRACT, Hollowell’s art becomes a journey into the epicenter of pain. On nine large-scale canvases, called Split orbs, the artist translates the physical experience of labor into color and form. As you wander about the space, the canvases should alternate light and dark – contraction and relaxation. The artwork approaches a color-phenomenological metaphor for the birth process. “I see the distances between the canvases as a kind of meditation. You step from one to the other, from one contraction to the next,” says the artist. The soft, smooth, and velvety textures of the canvases find a counterpart in the rough spots that repeatedly appear at the core of the paintings. Here Hollowell also picks up on the texture of the surroundings, the béton brut with which the former church of St. Agnes of the KÖNIG GALERIE was built in the post-war years.

© Images by Roman März

In keeping with Walter Benjamin’s theory of art, something of an aura can be witnessed in the work of Loie Hollowell. Her works capture what cannot be described in language. They have something otherworldly, transcendent; they take us to a cosmos of universal knowledge and deep introspection. There’s the quiet echo of those traumatic hours in the exhibition space, the echoes of the origins of life and the beauty therein.