{"id":463621,"date":"2026-05-28T02:07:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T02:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/463621\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T02:07:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T02:07:17","slug":"i-was-born-to-love-not-to-hate-the-painter-taking-inspiration-from-antigone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/463621\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI Was Born to Love, Not to Hate\u201d: The Painter Taking Inspiration From \u201cAntigone\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated4 min read<\/p>\n

Alexandra Grant is relentlessly curious. It\u2019s a quality that has followed the artist throughout her life. Once, one of her grade-school teachers wrote on her report card, \u201cAlexandra could learn in a dustbin,\u201d she recalls over a video call from her Berlin studio.<\/p>\n

The same inquisitive drive shapes how Grant, 53, works today. A voracious researcher, she often gravitates toward writers when thinking about painting. (Her mother thought she would be a writer.) \u201cWhat I love about being an artist,\u201d she says, \u201cis getting to follow a curiosity, follow a line of thought, and pursue it all the way to the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

One particular line of inquiry has occupied her mind for more than 10 years. In 2014, after the police killing of Michael Brown, Grant (admittedly, \u201clike many artists,\u201d she says) turned to Sophocles\u2019s Antigone, a Greek myth associated with mourning and defiance. What started as a response to violence blossomed into her \u201cAntigone 3000\u201d series, a body of work exploring memory and resistance through volatile abstract paintings. These works\u2014mixing abstract painting, collage, silk screen, and text-based art\u2014gradually morphed into giant, explosive canvases packed with clashing patterns and bright colors.<\/p>\n

More than a decade later, Grant has reached the end of this arc and is saying goodbye to Antigone in a new show titled \u201cAnakain\u014dsis<\/a>,\u201d which means renewal in Greek. She chose the word for its personal implication\u2014her decision to move forward in her painting career\u2014but also for how the myth reverberates across millennia. \u201cWhy is it that Antigone has lasted and been in the imagination of artists in every generation for 2,000 years?\u201d she says. \u201cUltimately, [Anakain\u014dsis] is about transmutation, transformation, but it\u2019s the transmutation and transformation that lasts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PaintingsAlbertz Benda<\/p>\n

Volcania (2026)<\/p>\n

\"GrantAlbertz Benda<\/p>\n

Motherhood (2026)<\/p>\n

Grant\u2019s \u201cAntigone\u201d paintings obsess over one excerpt from Sophocles\u2019s play: \u201cI was born to love, not to hate.\u201d The titular Greek heroine shouts these words at the tyrannical Greek king when he refuses to bury her brother\u2014a defiant stance against the king\u2019s state-imposed hatred. You don\u2019t have to wonder long about how Grant landed on this mantra. She first alluded to this scene as the country entered a period of volatile political upheaval, framed by near-constant collective mourning (exacerbated by Trump\u2019s rise in the mid-2010s). But over time, the phrase morphed into her personal mantra as she confronted \u201ccuriosity online\u201d about herself, as she calls it (brought on by her career and, likely, although she does not mention it directly, her more public relationship with Keanu Reeves<\/a>). The incantation sustained her creative process for 12 years. \u201cThe idea of overcoming challenges is very much in the work,\u201d she says. \u201cI needed the paintings. I needed to work through what I was living through, through the paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grant wielded the phrase in every iteration of the \u201cAntigone\u201d paintings. In 2019, the phrase appeared on amorphous wooden canvases, and by 2022, it was within hyperactive, increasingly baroque paintings. She dove into more abstract territory, yet the words (though often backwards) remained visibly silk-screened atop a hurricane of colors made by gestural brushstrokes (or squeegee marks). The new works, however, push further into abstraction. Here, Grant has embraced illegibility, exploring a more emotional \u201clanguage of painting,\u201d as she calls it. In Volcania<\/a> (2026)\u2014a bright frenzy of orange, red, pink, and yellow paint\u2014the words are nearly all obscured. This work certainly represents how Grant felt when she finished the last series. \u201cIt was like going to a fireworks display: It\u2019s over, there\u2019s the umbra of the smoke, and I was a bit breathless,\u201d she says. Grant is channeling the raw power of Antigone\u2019s incantation, where the words themselves don\u2019t seem all that necessary.<\/p>\n

\"grantJason Mandella<\/p>\n

Two paintings on view in \u201cAnakain\u014dsis\u201d at Albertz Benda in New York<\/p>\n

\u201cThis body of work is the letting go of the control of the writing; you can\u2019t read the words,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you see them in person, you just feel this volcanic energy, like firecrackers, like explosives, like a natural violence, if that\u2019s possible, a fire. Just like the transmutation, the transformation state that comes after this question is: What if the mantra works?\u201d<\/p>\n

Words have always played a tangible part in Grant\u2019s art practice. She started her career in sculpture, translating poems into mobiles, including one hanging beside her in her Berlin studio. It\u2019s a process that she says is essentially \u201cdrawing without paper.\u201d From there, she gradually moved to actually drawing on paper before painting, never letting go of the text-based element of her work. A similar evolution is mirrored in her \u201cAntigone\u201d series.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe earliest \u2018Antigone\u2019 work started out as a sculpture I had made in plaster, and then [I asked myself,] \u2018What if I did a rubbing on paper of the text and then drew around it, with the lines being the rule of law and the messiness of life?\u2019 \u201d she says. \u201c[Then I asked,] \u2018What if I took a photo of the rubbing and then learned how to silk-screen?\u2019 That was a radical shift that took place in 2019, five years in.\u2026 What that allowed me to do was shift on the canvas and then figure out how to layer the silk screen on top of and underneath the whole painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AlexandraRyan Doyle Photography<\/p>\n

Alexandra Grant<\/p>\n

Grant cherished Antigone and her words as she broke into the public spotlight and as her career underwent a meteoric rise and the world around her experienced seismic shifts. But now, after a few false endings, Grant is confident she\u2019s ready to move on, with the latest paintings representing a bittersweet \u201cgraduation from one state to another.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a period of time, Antigone was a heroine for me, and I have interpreted her through this incredible journey, and now I\u2019m going to go on to another stage of my own life,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m really thrilled that for that period of time, Antigone\u2019s mantra became mine. I did my absolute best to embody her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnakain\u014dsis\u201d at Albertz Benda in New York City will be on view from May 21 to July 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"4 min read Alexandra Grant is relentlessly curious. It\u2019s a quality that has followed the artist throughout her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,146561,2139,215789,438,4172,146,85,46,195853,1975,149299,215788,146560],"class_list":["post-463621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-books-music","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-928aeab3-7be2-48ff-a80b-1065c3ee34fa","tag-design","tag-displaytype-long-form-article","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-issyndicated-false","tag-locale-us","tag-read_time-5","tag-shorttitle-this-painter-transformed-antigone-into-paintings","tag-subsection-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}