September 25 – December 31, 2024
The Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in a European museum of the North American artist Alexandra Grant, known for her love of language. Through her interdisciplinary approach, Grant seeks to visualize and embody literary works in her artwork.
Grant was born in 1973 in Fairview Park, Ohio, and lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. She is a contemporary mixed media artist whose body of work includes painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video, as well as publishing. Her art is characterized by an interdisciplinary fascination with language as image, particularly in embodying the written word, an ideal subject for an exhibition at the Museum of Literature. Grant has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, and her works are in museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin (Texas), among others. Grant engages with the work of writers, poets, philosophers and linguists, including Wisława Szymborska, Michael Joyce, Hélène Cixous, Keanu Reeves, and Sophocles, thus earning the title of ‘a radical collaborator’. The artist calls herself ‘a writer who writes with materials’. Grant co-founded X Artists’ Books and runs the grantLOVE project, which supports artists and arts education through the sale of art editions.
The exhibition “Alexandra Grant. Word. Image. Space” highlights the artist’s diverse approaches to her literary interests and features painting, sculpture, photography, video installation and publishing projects. The highlight of the exhibition will be works inspired by Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry – from Grant’s 2009 series Whispers – as well as new works prepared specifically for the exhibition, such as a large-format sculptural installation made of wire and neon works. The artist will also present a series of works created after texts by writer Michael Joyce, a well-known author of hypertexts. One of the key ideas of the exhibition is to show Grant’s artistic relationship with Szymborska and Joyce. The neon pieces, wire sculpture-installation and painted tondos are all site-specific works, designed especially for the exhibition and designed for the specific spaces of the Museum of Literature. A separate focus of the exhibition, but closely related to the literary theme, will be the presentation of the activities of the publishing house X Artists’ Books, co-founded by Alexandra Grant with Keanu Reeves, and part of the Los Angeles-based artist’s private archive.
Alexandra Grant. Word. Image. Space was organized in close collaboration with the artist and with Irena Kain, a promoter of Polish art in Switzerland and Germany, who initiated and co-curated the project. The curator and author of the exhibition strategy on the part of the Museum is Dr. Anna Lipa.
A catalog will be published with an interview between Kain and Grant, and essays by Marta Smolinska, Anna Lipa, and Jarosław Klejnocki.
