Everything Belongs to the Cosmos is a catalog comprising 6 fold-out posters and a booklet that accompanies Alexandra Grant's exhibition with the same name that took place at the gallery carlier | gebauer in Berlin from November 24, 2024 until January 11, 2025.
Everything Belongs to the Cosmos is an installation of painted works by Los Angeles and Berlin-based painter Alexandra Grant based on texts by Polish writers and poets Anna Adamowicz, Krystyna Dąbrowska, Julia Fiedorczuk, Bianka Rolando, Olga Tokarczuk, and Urszula Zajączkowska. The six participating writers and poets were chosen and commissioned in 2021 and early 2022 with the assistance of Marcin Orliński and the contributed work was translated from Polish into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
The Polish writers and poets featured in Grant's painted Cosmos span generations and levels of recognition, with Tokarczuk the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature and are meant to highlight the current writing scene in Poland as each interprets an aspect of the cosmos. Taking each writer's text as a cue, Grant created one large-scale painting based on each text in English, each on paper and at a scale of 3.9 meter tall and 3 meter wide or larger, the largest works she has ever created. The installation of the six paintings is meant to create a chapel space—and quite literally a cosmos—for and of women's voices.
This catalog includes 6 fold-out posters featuring the painted works and a booklet with an introduction by Marcin Orliński and the contributed poems both in Polish and English.
Alexandra Grant (born 1973 in Fairview Park, Ohio, lives and works in Los Angeles) is a contemporary mixed media artist whose body of work includes painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and publishing. Her art is characterized by an interdisciplinary fascination with language as image, particularly in embodying the written word. Described a s a "writer who writes with materials" and "a radical collaborator," Grant engages with the work of writers, poets, philosophers and linguists including Sophocles, Wisława Szymborska, Michael Joyce, Hélène Cixous, and Keanu Reeves. 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, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and others. Grant co-founded, with Keanu Reeves, X Artists' Books and runs the grantLOVE project, which supports artists and arts education through the sale of art editions.
