‘I was super horny when I made my early work’: Loie Hollowell’s abstract paintings of breasts and vaginas

Equally inspired by childbirth manuals, Georgia O’Keeffe and her own hormones, pregnancy and motherhood, Hollowell paints beautiful anatomical abstractions. She opens up about her cosmic birth and out-of-body experience‘It’s magical,” says Loie Hollowell. “It’s such good timing!” The artist, speaking via Zoom from her studio in Queens, New York, is referring to the Artemis II moon mission. Little did she know, when she named her latest painting series Overview Effect, after the term used by astronauts to describe the experience of seeing Earth from space and the profound feelings of awe and interconnectedness it provokes, that she’d be coinciding with this space odyssey. But she is not surprised anyone would want to leave Earth for a while. “We’re having so many problems here,” she says.Overview Effect, currently at London’s Pace Gallery, features large-scale canvases combining twin concave and convex sculpted circles. If you folded the canvasses in half vertica