Since approximately 1500 B.C.E., chickens have become earth’s most widely domesticated—and abused—creatures. “They live amongst people so easily, but then there’s a tendency in humans to push them into cockfights again, to put them back into their nature,” rising artist Holly Lowen told me in her Tribeca studio, while two paintings of roosters watched on. In one of these works, a lone rooster soars through the air, mid-karate-kick. The other depicts a torrent of the flightless fowl tumbling from nowhere. “What is that about human nature that we’re like, ‘we’ve declawed you entirely, and now we want to see you fight again?’” Lowen mused.
The artist’s latest body of work goes on view this week at Perrotin New York in “Colosseum,” her debut show in the city, on view through July 31st. Her ritzy yet uncanny tennis-core paintings have become her visual calling card. The roosters, however, are new. Both embody Lowen’s interest in competition as a relic of humankind’s wild origins.
Lowen studied art history at Duke, then interior architecture at Parsons, before joining New York–based architecture and design firm Meyer Davis. After giving birth in 2016, however, she started wondering whether she really loved that profession. She ended up realizing her true devotion to art. “To me, art is like an addiction, an affair, something just like a whirlpool of obsession,” Lowen told me in her studio, where she’s worked ever since—an airy, economical room in her family’s Tribeca apartment. “I didn’t think I could find something like that, that would make sense to take time away from the kids.”
Lowen taught herself to paint by first learning how to render subjects hyperrealistically, inspired by Cj Hendry. “I thought if I could get to that level,” Lowen said, “I could do whatever I wanted.” After all, you have to know the rules in order to effectively break them.
Several years into these self-directed studies, “I realized I needed a real MFA,” Lowen continued. “I didn’t feel like I could jump into my conceptual side as deeply without that friction of community, feedback, and critique.” She enrolled at the New York Academy of Art, an alma mater of major contemporary names like Naudline Pierre and Jordan Casteel, situated blocks from Lowen’s home.
There, Lowen became enamored of the compositional motif she calls “entanglement,” inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’s twisting scenes and Édouard Manet’s “strange angles.”
Tennis entered later. Lowen spent high school hooked on the game’s rush. “You're beating someone, and you’re really engaged,” she said. “The feeling is so intense and animalistic, but the actual outside view of it is so preppy and perfect and quiet.” Lowen realized it’s the perfect metaphor for another lifelong love of hers—evolutionary psychology, the study of “how we’re meant to be, or how we were originally made, and clawing our way back to our natural state, versus the rules of civility that have been imposed upon us,” as she put it. Her first-ever exhibition, with Simchowitz Gallery during Frieze Los Angeles 2025, paired paintings of tennis players with paintings of flamingos—birds which look whimsical, but are incredibly tough.
Since then, Lowen has exhibited tennis paintings and scenes of flamingos tied into literal knots alongside the equally buzzy sculptures of Jeffrey Meris with François Ghebaly at New York’s Duet art show. She’s shown with Perrotin several times as well, in the gallery’s group show during last year’s Art Basel Paris, and at its Art Basel Miami Beach booth months later.
Lowen’s solo Perrotin debut, though, will present several new developments in her practice. For starters, this is her most expansive series of large works thus far. Some measure 5-by-5 feet, transforming the act of painting into its own sport—while more readily enveloping viewers. She’s also experimenting with new techniques, painting indirectly (rather than alla prima) by layering water-mixable oil paint over variously hued grounds of acrylic or flatter Flashe vinyl paint. These radiant foundations set the stage for slippery clay courts like the one in The Audience (all works 2026) or delicate grassy ones, as seen in Shared Myth or Dunbar’s Number.
Lowen has started layering her paint with a heavier hand as well, paradoxically producing the lighter wash effects that enhance these works’ dreamy auras. Impeccably clad yet proportionally off-kilter figures emerge. Sometimes they brawl, blurring the line between one and many in Escher-esque arrangements that evoke Eadweard Muybridge’s motion photographs while confounding the rules of tennis, where no more than four players normally take the court. Elsewhere, these athletes rest, recover, even canoodle. Faces remain evasive across the board, unsettling viewers on a primal level. These works remind us that no matter how humanity attempts to dress up its roots, our brains—which evolve much slower than society—still bear our animal nature. The artificial politesse surrounding a game like tennis only thrusts this reality to the fore.
