1. Loie Hollowell at Pace

Titled Overview Effect (the effect of viewing Earth from space), Loie Hollowell‘s new exhibition at Pace Gallery plays with scale at its extremes. In the main gallery, huge paintings tower through the space (her largest works to date). Each one features two circular forms, one concave and the other convex — protruding outward from the canvas — to create a dynamic play with space and shadow. The limited color palette of these works focuses on primaries and their combinations: arcs of muted colors radiate out from the central and boldly colored circles to create a painted effect that mimics optical plays with light and shadow. Hints of rainbows appear across the color spectrum, as if a lens flare. 

In the second gallery, smaller works (the artist’s smallest to date) also play with painting's ability to create optical illusions. A small form protrudes from each of the monochrome paintings that hung in a long row across the wall in a rainbow-colored progression. Radiating down from each protrusion is a harsh vertical color shift that splits each canvas down the middle to create an optical dimensionality. On closer inspection, the protruded form in each work is a nipple, each one cast from a various breast-feeding friend of the artist. These abstract paintings suddenly snap into view as portraits of a variety of women, each engaged in the bodily, raw, and intimate act of child-rearing. 

In this lens, the larger works in the first gallery could be viewed as bodily, the circles womb-like (the press release also connects the concentric ripples across the canvas to contractions during childbirth). In this way, Hollowell dually presents an abstract and visually arresting exhibition that celebrates motherhood, female community, and the immense capacity of the female body. 

On view: November 9th, 2024–January 18th, 2025 | Open map

2. Chase Hall at David Kordansky Gallery

At Chase Hall‘s exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, you will see a lot of grinning faces beaming back at you. Portraits of rugby players, equestrians, surfers, and other athletes are portrayed with humble grandiosity. There are also groups of people depicted in the paintings — groups of men in brightly colored suits or overalls, community gathered in front of a brick building — huddling together as if posing for a family portrait. This combination of subjects suggests a link between athletes — who fight for victory on their respective playing fields alongside teammates — with the role that community plays in our everyday lives. 

Hall’s handling of paint is a significant aspect of these works, each figure is depicted with heavily patterned attire, using the negative white space of the canvas behind the figures to articulate the creases and shadows of their clothing. Bright reds, purples, and muted earth tones abut each other in the pattern of heavy and active surfaces. The artist, significantly, uses coffee in these works to stain various sections of each painting, looping in themes of trade and commerce. The exhibition takes up the traditional mantle of portraiture, yet adds a certain type of expressionist mark-making that adds whimsy and subtle narrative to the works. 

On view: November 8th–December 14th, 2024 | Open map

3. Blue Dream at Shrine

The color blue has descended on Shrine. Across the space, the color, usually associated with tranquility, or perhaps sadness, saturates the walls in the group exhibition. While the works in the show take on a number of themes, the color blue unites all of them creating an aesthetic cohesion. One artist included, Carla Edwards, takes vintage American flags and dyes them in darker indigo hues before sewing them back together in quilted arrangements. In this particular iteration, a central vaginal form takes shape in the piece, titled “Tear” a potent commentary on the stifling of women’s rights within American politics. 

Other works take a more fantastical approach, like the Trulee Hall painting, “Foot Cleaning,” which pictures a large pair of feet submerged by water surrounded by smaller figures that pour buckets of water onto the feet as if washing. Here, a tender narrative of community and togetherness. Ava McDonough’s contribution is a detailed microscopic view of a butterfly wing painted in pale blue and white and is so zoomed in on its subject that the painting almost appears abstract in nature. While these works range in content and subject, the exhibition provides a moment of pause to consider how color can manifest emotions — the color blue has the capacious capacity to range from playful to tranquil to melancholy.

On view: November 9th–December 21st, 2024| Open map

Hunting for a Light-Filled Experience

“When I started diving deep into creating three-dimensional spaces in my paintings,” Loie Hollowell says in an Art21 interview, “I was now having to deal with illusory space and real space — constructed shadow and constructed light vs real light and real shadow. What I’ve found that I love about having a painting that in reality is a sculpture, is that it changes within each context, within each space that it's hung.” 

About her current exhibition at Pace, Hollowell wrote to me, saying that the exhibition references some of her earliest influences of Robert Irwin and James Turell, light and space artists that are a part of the fabric of California’s specific art history. “Color and light are central characters in my painting practice,” she told Art21. “There’s always that hunting, that searching, for a light-filled experience, even if it’s a dark subject matter or an indescribable subject matter.”