In Loie Hollowell’s work, landscapes of foothills are also buttocks. Apple-shaped projections are also labial folds. Pairs of breasts peek out from vertical horizons. Vaginal slits in hillsides are overseen by red clitoral suns.

If seeing her new retrospective “Space Between, a Survey of Ten Years” at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University makes you blush, it means you’re probably getting it; she has called her paintings “porn for myself.”

Suggestive, erotic and spiritual, Hollowell’s art explores themes of feminism, sexual freedom, gender, reproductive rights and motherhood. Influenced by neo-tantric and transcendental painting, surrealism, California funk and 1960s light and space art, her work has been compared to that of Georgia O’Keeffe, Judy Chicago, Agnes Pelton, Hilma af Klint, Ghulam Rasool Santosh and Biren De.

Often, the scale of her art directly correlates to the size of her own body, including her breasts, groin and head; these works include life casts of pregnant breasts and bellies.

“She makes very, very personal paintings which also have this lovely tension between the personal mirrors that they carry and a kind of imagery that feels very rooted in traditions of abstraction, even traditions of mysticism, transcendental symbolism,” says Chase Westfall, interim director of the ICA at VCU. “She’s following in the footsteps of some really significant, path-blazing female artists yet adding her own layers and voice to bring those conversations forward into our contemporary moment.”

A native of Northern California, Hollowell attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, for undergrad and VCU for her master’s of fine arts in painting.

The earliest drawings in “Space Between” were finished a few months after Hollowell had an abortion in 2013, which she says changed the trajectory of her work. Earlier this year, Hollowell told Vogue that while that period of her life was “tumultuous … the abortion itself was so empowering,” and that she wanted to express the liberation she felt through her art.

Even before then, Westfall says Hollowell was interested in exploring themes of performance and the body through her art.

“Those performances often involved her body in very visceral and vulnerable ways, so there has always been a tendency towards the body as a site of content and narrative, of subject matter,” Westfall says. “There has always been a willingness to make her personal embodied experience readily available in a courageous and vulnerable way.”

Through its evocation of both the human body and otherworldly landscapes, Hollowell’s art bridges figuration and abstraction; her work often takes the form of large, three-dimensional canvases that blend painting and sculpture. One such example is a series of bas-relief paintings that chart the dilation of the cervix in centimeter increments, the type that are tracked during a vaginal birth. Out of these paintings protrude three-dimensional bellies made of resin.

“The concept that they carry is sometimes humorous and sometimes a little lewd in a way that can be fun and surprising,” says Westfall of her work. “It can reward different kinds of audiences in different ways.”

While painting is a long-established artform, Westfall says “there are degrees of innovation, degrees of radicality in her painting that make sure you feel the freshness and urgency of an experience that is new.”

“As a painter, I sort of drool over these things,” he adds. “The paintings are absolutely masterfully put together. They are really exquisite, breathtaking objects. There’s a lot of formal sophistication, there’s a lot of material sophistication.”

Noting Hollowell’s meteoric rise in the art world, Westfall says this retrospective, which premiered earlier this year at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is an excellent introduction to her work.

“You can see how incrementally, and sometimes more singularly, she’s introducing variation and change and growing her voice and her practice,” he says. “It’s a great, great crash course in who Loie is as an artist and what she’s been up to.”

“Loie Hollowell: Space Between, a Survey of Ten Years,” runs through March 9, 2025, at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, 601 W. Broad St. Free. For more information, visit icavcu.org or call (804) 828-2823.