On View

We have art for the eyes and music for the ears, but what about about creative stimuli for our sense of smell?
A new show at Phillips auction house in Paris is addressing this question through a new show of olfactory sculptures by six artists, including Joana Vasconcelos and Adel Abdessemed, which incorporate uniquely created fragrances by perfumers.
“Profile By” is the fruit of an exploration by fragrance expert Diane Thalheimer, who invited each artist to team up with a perfumer to develop a fragrance and embed it into an artwork. She shared her idea with the fragrance production company International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), which agreed to pair six of its perfumers with the artists selected by Thalheimer. Strangely, Vasconcelos is the only woman artist included in the project. Thalheimer later approached Phillips, which offered to host the exhibition in its venue.
“I chose artists who have strong personalities and a distinctive approach towards making art because that means their olfactory identity will be stronger,” Thalheimer told Artnet News. She then interviewed each artist to unravel their “olfactory identity” before matching each of them with an IFF perfumer.
Joana Vasconcelos. Photo: Kyla Rosselli.
Vasconcelos conveys in her scent, titled Lança, her interest in well-being and yoga. Her collaborator, perfumer Anne Flipo, sought to translate the seven chakras into an incense-based fragrance, which is diffused via Vasconcelos’s small, cross-shaped white ceramics decorated with brightly colored crochet.
“We had Zoom meetings every week to discuss the fragrance and we met in Paris so I could understand the world of fragrances [by visiting the IFF laboratory],” Vasconcelos, who represented Portugal at the 2013 Venice Biennale, said of the collaboration.
The experience of incorporating the sense of smell into her work has led Vasconcelos, who has exhibited monumental works at the Château de Versailles and the Bon Marché department store, to contemplate sculpture differently. “Normally my pieces are very large and occupy a space. Here, the sculptures are small and it is the fragrance that fills the volume of the space instead,” she said. Vasconcelos intends to incorporate scent-filled sculptures into her exhibition at the chapel Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes in France next year.
The exhibition also highlights the importance of smell at a time when many people are losing it. “My cousin is one of many people who lost his sense of smell after contracting COVID-19,” Vasconcelos said.
Pablo Reinoso. Photo: Kyla Rosselli.
Meanwhile, French-Argentine artist Pablo Reinoso, who has designed fragrance bottles in the past, collaborated with perfumer Domitille Michalon Bertier to develop a fresh, woody scent that is diffused through the enamel part of his spiraling wooden sculpture, Rocking Me.
“I’ve worked on creating fragrances for Givenchy but this is the first time that I’ve developed something about my own taste and not strategically for the consumer,” Reinoso said. “My concept is that rocking the sculpture activates the fragrance.”
The most sensual piece is perhaps Abdessemed’s Noli me tangere—a ball containing an oriental rose fragrance balanced under a ceramic-and-plaster white sculpture of a woman’s foot. “When he smelled the rose [note], he immediately thought of a woman’s foot and envisioned seeing a woman that he can’t reach,” perfumer Paul Guerlain explained.
Adel Abdessamed Photo: Kyla Rosselli.
French sculptor and designer Hubert Le Gall is so enthusiastic about the project that he included his fragrance-embedded pieces in his current exhibition “Greek Fantasy” at Villa Kérylos in the south of France. He worked with Jean-Christophe Hérault on the aromatic fragrance inspired by the Greek god of wine, Dionysus, which is diffused through a vase pierced by a branch with glass beads.
Each sculpture is produced in an edition of 15 to 50, with prices ranging from €4,000 to €14,000 ($4,800 to $16,900).
“Profile By” is on view at Phillips, 46 Rue du Bac, 75007 Paris, until June 24, 2021.

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A life-sized marble skull that has for centuries sat in plain sight at a German castle turns out to actually be the work of artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
The skull, sculpted from white Carrara marble, was on display at Schloss Pillnitz, a palace south of Dresden until curator Claudia Kryza-Gersch had it sent to the State Art Collections of Dresden for restoration. There, she and other researchers puzzled over its origin. 
“Everybody had the same reaction to it,” Kryza-Gersch told the Art Newspaper. “We were standing around a table, looking at it. The question of course was—who made it? And since it has Roman provenance, someone jokingly said ‘maybe it’s a Bernini?’”
In fact, further research revealed that the skull was indeed made by the Italian master for Pope Alexander VII in the mid-17th century. “Our jokes were proven right,” the curator said.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Skull (1655). © SKD. Photo: Oliver Killig.
The skull went on view under the artist’s name for the first time today in “Bernini, the Pope and Death,” an exhibition at the State Art Collections.
Kryza-Gersch and her team found that, just days after being appointed, in 1655, Alexander VII—who was born Fabio Chigi—commissioned Bernini to make both the marble skull and a lead sarcophagus. The objects, morbid reminders of death’s close presence, would live on the Pope’s desk and under his bed. 
They soon proved prophetic: A year later, a plague hit Italy, killing hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Rome, however, was among the least impacted cities as Alexander VII ordered a series of effective restrictions that will surely sound familiar today: quarantines, masks, and lockdowns. 
Guido Ubaldo Abbatini, Pope Alexander VII with Bernini’s skull (1655-56). © Art Collection of the Sovereign Order of Malta, Rome. Photo: Nicusor Floroaica.
Following Alexander VII’s death in 1667, the skull remained in the Chigi family’s collection until 1728, when it was purchased along with a trove of 164 other antique sculptures and four contemporary artworks, by Augustus the Strong. It was thereafter transferred to Dresden. 
Also included in the the current Dresden exhibition is a 1655-56 portrait of Alexander VII, shown with his hand atop the skull, painted by Bernini’s pupil Guido Ubaldo Abbatini.
“Bernini, the Pope and Death” is on view at the State Art Collections of Dresden now through September 5, 2021.
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After more than a year working in isolation, Sean Scully decided to go in the opposite direction. He swung open the doors of his studio to invite art lovers in. The Irish-American artist’s latest exhibition, “12 Black Windows,” takes place in two parts—at Lisson Gallery’s space on 24th Street and Scully’s own Chelsea workspace. (Visits can be scheduled here). 
Inside the studio, one encounters The 12 (2020), a 12-panel grouping of new paintings in his ongoing “Landline” series. They range from joyous to somber in their tones and seem to echo the range of emotions felt over the past year, from tragedy to jubilation and relief.
Though these works still engage the alternating bands of color that have defined “Landline” series since Scully began it over 20 years ago, they are rooted in the experiences of the global pandemic, quarantine, Black Lives Matter protests, and mass uncertainty that Scully experienced firsthand in New York. In the studio, the works occupy their own room and act almost like sentries at a fortified structure or pillars in a temple, conferring a sense of gravity in opposition to the unpredictability of the outside world. 
“The world in which we live, the existential threat from COVID, and the environmental problems we face have influenced me greatly in my art,” the artist said in a statement.
In the gallery, the exhibition continues with Dark Windows (2020), a suite of five works created at the height of the pandemic. Here, Scully introduces a new element, the seemingly sinister black square—an allusion to Malevich’s 1915 Black Box. The shape—which evokes censors, stunned silence, and even “Blackout Tuesday” Instagram posts—represents a departure for Scully, whose work normally calls to mind open landscapes and horizon lines.
“There is no doubt that they are a response to the pandemic and to what mankind has been doing to nature,” Scully said. “What really strikes me as tragic is that what is a relief for nature is a torment for us. And what is a pleasure for us is a torment for nature. That seems to be the conundrum that we’ve got ourselves into.”
See the installation of “12 Black Windows” and get an inside look at the show below.

“Sean Scully: 12 Black Windows” is on view at Lisson Gallery through June 18, 2021.
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A long-awaited public artwork by critically acclaimed artist David Hammons is finally on the verge of its official unveiling, and as workers complete the finishing touches on the installation, the piece can already be seen by eagle-eyed art lovers on the water’s edge across from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
Seven years in the making, Day’s End (2021) will open to the public on Sunday, May 16, during a “community day” for the institution. Admission to the museum will be free from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Capacity is limited, but there will be family programming in outdoor spaces, as well as a bilingual kids’ activity guide to the new work.
David Hammons, Day’s End (2021) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
The permanent artwork takes the ghostly shape of the 325-foot-long, 52-foot-tall shed that formerly stood on Pier 52, off the Gansevoort Peninsula, the only remaining section of Manhattan’s old 13th Avenue. It is Hammons’s tribute to Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), who in 1975 reclaimed the old abandoned shed as a work of art, using a blow torch to carve five holes into the structure’s walls to create a “sun and water temple.”
The city tried to sue Matta-Clark for the unauthorized artwork—also titled Day’s End—but ultimately dropped the charges. The building, which was in its latter years an illicit meeting place for the gay community, was later demolished.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (Pier 52) (Exterior with Ice), 1975, created by slicing holes in the exterior of a shed on Manhattan’s Pier 52. Photo courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Hammons pitched the idea to the Whitney in 2014 in an unconventional manner. Shortly after visiting the institution ahead of its public opening that year, the artist sent the museum a pencil sketch showing the outline of a building floating above the Hudson. He did not include a letter, only the caption “Monument to Gordon Matta-Clark” in block letters under the drawing.
“During his tour, while gazing out the west-facing windows toward the Hudson River, I had made an off-hand comment that artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s notorious and now legendary artwork entitled Day’s End (1975) was once located on the waterfront across the way,” Adam D. Weinberg, the museum’s  director, wrote in a recent essay on the Whitney website. “In retrospect, I now realize that Hammons was more captivated by the waterfront than by the museum’s magnificent fifth-floor galleries in which he stood.”
Yet the artist didn’t recreate the structure with the hefty girders that were used when it was first built in the 19th century.
“[Hammons] desired the frame to be as thin as possible so that it would appear like his sketch: evanescent, fugitive (in both senses of the word), and ephemeral, suspended in space,” Weinberg wrote.
The result is something of an apparition, becoming more or less visible depending on the weather and time of day.
A rendering of the new Hudson River Park on Gansevoort Peninsula, with David Hammons’s Day’s End. Image courtesy of James Corner Field Operations.
The Whitney has overseen the construction of Day’s End (2021), and will be responsible for its upkeep, but is donating the work to the Hudson River Park Trust as part of the terms of the Hudson River Park Act legislation that approved its creation.
There are plans to turn Gansevoort Peninsula into a park with picnic tables, kayak slips, a lawn, a sports field, and Manhattan’s first public beach, which will be located underneath Day’s End. Construction will begin this spring.
See more photos of the site under construction and renderings below.
David Hammons, Day’s End (2021) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
A rendering of David Hammons’s homage to Gordon Matta-Clark Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
David Hammons, Day’s End (rendering). Image courtesy of Guy Nordenson and Associates.
A rendering of the new Hudson River Park on Gansevoort Peninsula, with David Hammons’s Day’s End seen with Manhattan’s first public beach. Image courtesy of James Corner Field Operations.
A rendering of the new Hudson River Park on Gansevoort Peninsula, with David Hammons’s Day’s End seen with Manhattan’s first public beach. Image courtesy of James Corner Field Operations.
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In the 1985 film Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, Big Bird gets kidnapped by a traveling circus. Its owners paint him blue, cage him, and force him to sing the song “I’m So Blue” for their audience.
Thankfully, Big Bird seems to have made his escape in Alex Da Corte‘s new roof garden commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He perches in all his feathered glory atop a crescent moon and clutches a ladder as he floats through space, balanced atop a fully functioning Alexander Calder-style mobile. The ladder suggests that he is not stranded, and that he has the ability to end his isolation.
“It’s a surrogate for where we are collectively at this moment, kind of contemplating a future and not knowing what we’re facing—really, a sense of vulnerability,” Shanay Jhaveri, the museum’s assistant curator of international Modern and contemporary art, told Artnet News. “It’s about this idea of looking out at new horizons.”
The sculpture, As Long as the Sun Lasts, is named for a Italo Calvino’s short story about intergalactic travelers searching for a planet to call home.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Alex began the project at the height of the pandemic,” Jhaveri said. “He thought the work should speak to the future and also encapsulate our own sense of vulnerability and confronting uncertainty.”
The 40-year-old artist chose to paint Big Bird’s feathers blue not only because of the Sesame Street film, but also in reference to the Muppet’s Brazilian cousin, Garibaldo, who Da Corte watched as a child in Venezuela, as well as the color’s traditional associations with sadness.
The piece’s melancholic feel is offset with a sense of whimsy, with the base of the mobile built to look like the interlocking plastic walls of a Little Tykes Outdoor Activity Gym—another ’80s relic. It’s signed with Da Corte’s take on Calder’s signature monogram, and the number 69, in reference to the year of the moon landing, the first episode of Sesame Street, and when Da Corte’s father immigrated to the U.S.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Alex wanted to touch upon the liveliness and the unpredictability that is so much at the heart of Calder’s practice, but also the playfulness,” Jhaveri said.
Fabricating the piece was a challenge, from producing Big Bird’s 7,000 individually placed aluminum feathers to achieving the perfect balance of the mobile, which spins gently in the breeze.
“It was very important that it had to move, but not be mechanized,” Jhaveri said. “It had to be something that  responded to the air currents and moved intermittently, because in life, things happen intermittently—it’s not instant.”
See more photos of the work below.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, April 16–October 31, 2021. 
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When artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson was five months into her pregnancy in 1965, she developed breathing problems stemming from cardiomyopathy, and was forced to finish out her nine months confined to the hospital, living inside an oxygen tank. Spending most of her days alone in the hospital, the artist became acutely aware of her fragile state.
“When you are experiencing the threat of death, you become so aware of time,” Leeson says in an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the New York Close Up series, “that’s really a gift, to become so sick early in my life.”
In the interview, which premiered as part of the tenth season of Art21’s show Art in the Twenty First Century, Leeson recounts her early work in the 1960s and ’70s, and how it was inspired by her health problems.
During her recovery, Leeson took a night course in wax casting at UCLA, where she began creating casts of her own face. As her breathing improved, she decided to add a sound element to the resulting works. “When you’re so isolated, you hear more,” she tells Art21. Ultimately, the wax sculptures featured both sounds of the artist’s breathing and dialogue.
When the artist was invited to show in a group exhibition at UCLA, she included a selection of the talking wax sculptures, which proved unnerving to observers. “Within two days, the museum closed the show. They said ‘Media isn’t art.’ ‘Sound isn’t art.’”
Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Drawing Breath.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.
But that institutional rejection actually prompted Leeson to keep working. She describes the experience as “the best thing that happened to me,” adding, “the cultural experience of having your voice suppressed has made having a voice really important to what I do.”
In June 2021, the New Museum in Manhattan will present the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s wide-ranging video and sound work in “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. The artist’s solo exhibition, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” will be on view at the New Museum from June 2021.
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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Museums are generally secure spaces, hermetically sealed off from the outside world and its fluctuating temperature, humidity, and light—not to mention its winds, rains, and wandering birds.
But the Danish–Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has removed those barriers in an ambitious new project at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.
For the project, titled Life, Eliasson has flooded the museum’s outdoor pond, letting it flow inside by having the institution’s exterior glass facade removed.
The museum, now only a shell, is left open to the elements—and it is also open to visitors around the clock, day and night, until July.
The artwork “is never the same and it will continue to transform throughout the duration of the exhibition,” Sam Keller, the director of the Fondation Beyeler, told Artnet News.
“What is surprising is the great variations of emotions, reflections, and interactions of visitors… The [health] crisis has revealed new layers of meaning and has made obvious how strongly our lives are entangled with other humans and non-humans alike.”
The show (which features uranine, a non-toxic dye and compound the artist first used in 1998, when he poured it into various rivers) looks a bit like a wet reinterpretation of the artist’s acclaimed exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2014, where he redrew the museum by installing a stoney riverbed inside.
In Basel, a breeze blows through Renzo Piano’s building from the museum’s gardens, as dwarf water lilies, shellflowers, and water ferns float in bright green water throughout the space.
After a year in which much of the Western art world spent its time living behind screens, the shows offers a visceral experience to those who can attend.
But it also gives those still mostly engaging with art online—such as this writer—a chance to see the show by way of five live-streams.
By blending the boundaries between the virtual and the actual, Eliasson said the exhibition becomes more visibly entangled with the world: “This entanglement is our way of being.”
See more images of the show below.
Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
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Why bright colors? Why geometric forms? What is beauty? 
These are all questions that painter Loie Hollowell poses to herself and strives to answer with her work, which is (of course) all of those things: brightly colored, geometric, and handsome.
The artist, who gave birth to her second child during the pandemic, spoke to Art21 in an exclusive interview as part of the “New York Close Up” series about how her painting was changed by her pregnancy.
“My work is an expression of my core sensuality,” Hollowell said. “I’m a body experiencing desire, experiencing pleasure… It is sensual and needy and dirty and expressive.” 
In the video, Hollowell describes the experience of choosing to have an abortion in her late 20s, and the tumult of conflicting emotions and the bodily transformation.
Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Loie Hollowell’s Transcendent Bodies.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.
As a child, Hollowell grew up in the midst of the Light and Space movement in California, where artists were invested in using light to manipulate environments and perceptions.
Those influences come to bear in Hollowell’s work, though she manages to conjure the same effects on a canvas instead of in the wider world.
“What 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,” she says.
“There’s always that hunting, that searching for a light-filled experience,” she tells Art21.
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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