Everything Belongs to the Cosmos is a publication that captures six 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 commissioned in 2021 and early 2022 with the assistance of Marcin Orliński and translated from Polish into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
The publication, in a folder emblazoned with Grant's neon sculpture soc som, features six fold-out posters of Grant's painted works and an accompanying booklet of the poems or texts of each author, with an introduction by Marcin Orliński, in Polish and English.
The writers and poets featured in Grant's painted Cosmos span generations and levels of recognition—Tokarczuk is the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature—and they highlight the current Polish writing scene, as each interprets an aspect of the cosmos. Grant created one painting for each text, interpreting them into large-scale works on paper. At 3.9 meters tall and 3 meters wide or larger, these are the largest works she has ever created. Together, the six installed paintings create a chapel space—and quite literally a cosmos—for and of women's voices. The exhibition Everything Belongs to the Cosmos took place at carlier | gebauer gallery in Berlin from November 24, 2024 to January 11, 2025.
Alexandra Grant 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 as 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 X Artists' Books and runs the grantLOVE project, which supports artists and arts education through the sale of art editions.
