Holly Lowen: Colosseum presents paintings of tennis players, ball boys, teenage girls, and cockfighting chickens that interrogate the thin line between instinct and control. Bodies in classic white uniforms project composure while cycling through intensity, collapse, and recovery; titles referencing Hobbes — Leviathan, State of Nature — frame the court as a social contract tenuously maintained. Working across oil, pen, charcoal, and pastel on absorbent vinyl paint, Lowen fragments, elongates, and obscures her figures into unstable anatomies that blur familiar and uncanny. The exhibition asks what happens when primal instincts are channeled into acceptable outlets — and what accumulates when they cannot be fully repressed.
