Holly Lowen's 'Colosseum' at Perrotin: When the Gallery Becomes the Arena

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 29, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Holly Lowen's 'Colosseum' at Perrotin: When the Gallery Becomes the Arena At a Glance Cross town for Holly Lowen's "Colosseum" at Perrotin, where near-life-scale tennis paintings stage the gallery as an arena and the trick only lands for a body standing in the ring. The first thing the show does is put a person in the stands. Holly Lowen’s tennis players hang near life-scale around the room in tournament whites, caught mid-collapse and mid-recovery, and the title says where the visitor is standing: “Colosseum,” her first New York show and her first with Perrotin, on view June 10 through July 31. The gallery’s own text frames the bodies plainly: her painting s of tennis players are “studies in behavioral performance, where bodies cycle through moments of intensity, collapse, and recovery.” A critic reviews those bodies. What a painter notices first is that the room has been built to make the viewer the crowd. Why ‘Colosseum’ hangs the gallery as an arena, not a wall Scale is the first installation decision, and Lowen pushed it. This is her largest body of work so far, several canvases five feet square; one, “Social Contract,” is listed as “Oil on linen, 152.4 x 152.4 cm | 60 x 60 inches.” At that size a tennis player stops being a picture on a wall and arrives at eye-to-eye, court-side height. The title and the scale together do the thing a single tidy wall of pictures never could: they turn the floor into the arena and the person walking it into a spectator in the round. A Colosseum is not a row of framed images. It is a ring with bodies performing in the middle and a crowd pressed around the edge. A Colosseum isn’t a wall of pictures. It’s a ring, with the crowd built from whoever walks in. That is the reading the room hands over before a single brushstroke is examined. The aggression in the painting s, the masked violence of a sport played in pressed whites, only completes when the visitor is positioned as the watching mob. Hang these small and in a corridor and the metaphor collapses into illustration. Hang them big and surrounding, and the room finishes the painting . What the absorbent ground demands from the light The surface carries the second installation decision, and it is the one a phone will never show. Lowen works “across oil, pen, charcoal, and pastel,” building on top of “an absorbent vinyl paint that creates a rich tonal depth, recalling Peter Paul Rubens’ use of opulent colors.” An absorbent ground drinks light instead of bouncing it, so the depth lives down inside the paint, not on a glossy skin sitting on top. A surface like that wants even, frontal light. Drop a hard raking spot on it and the tonal depth flattens into a chart of highlights, and the Rubens glow she is chasing closes up. It also needs throwback distance, the way all hyperreal paint does: it resolves at a remove and dissolves into marks up close, so a crowded hang that pushes a nose to the canvas kills the realism and the depth at