Photo by Brian Forrest. Courtesy Honor Fraser, Los Angeles

Alexandra Grant, "First Portal (mind) (after Michael Joyce’s “Six Portals,” 2007)" (2008). Mixed media on paper, 114 3⁄8 x 80 in.

   November 2008 Reviews

Total Enlightenment

Paul McCarthy

Eleanor Antin

Roger Hiorns

Lorraine O'Grady

Ron Amstutz

Raha Raissnia

Dave Cole

Multiple Modernities:
India, 1905 - 2005

Clare Woods

Gemma Holt

Roger Hilton

Joachim Koester

The Talamoni Collection

Amelie Von Wulffen

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Alexandra Grant’s systematic paintings reveal a steady handling of text and image, as well as the artist’s often elaborate processes of fusing the two. The show centers on six towering works of collage, paint, and graphite on paper jam-packed with words and phrases. With the help of her frequent collaborator, writer Michael Joyce, Grant used a series of six obscure Buddhist sutras transcribed around the first century bc as the foundation for her own poetic texts. As subjective meditations, these texts simultaneously take their form from and are rendered illegible by Grant’s compositions. Sixth Portal (nose) (all works 2008) is an arrangement of French words written backward in curvy, almost juvenile handwriting (Grant’s signature style) that adds a playful tone to the work. Layers of complementary colored words, many contained in painted ovals, produce a horror vacui that approaches Color Field painting. And while the lettering produces a thick, textured ground, the words are seemingly meaningless, detached from their original context. Fifth Portal (body) offers a corpus of Spanish words (ella, salud, dolor), arranged on a vertical axis so that the words on the left half of the painting are reflected backward on the right, like a face, or the wings of a moth. Through this symmetrical arrangement, the act of reading is literally inverted and forced to become an act of looking.

Translation and interpretation are central to these pieces, and Grant, who is trilingual, employs an array of semantic and literary procedures. Abbreviation, quotation, and the most insignificant utterance—the flux that lies outside of grammatical systems—all motivate and steer the artist’s formal decisions resulting in works that free script from structure and the lexis from meaning. "Alexandra Grant" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.