Ochi Projects is pleased to participate in the second edition of the Marfa Invitational from April 22 - 25, 2021. A vernissage will be held on Thursday, April 22^nd from 5 to 8 PM, with programming and events throughout the weekend. The gallery will exclusively debut a new body of work by artist Alexandra Grant. In addition to new paintings and neons, Marfa Invitational will concurrently host a grantLOVE pop up. Founded in 2008 by the artist, grantLOVE is a philanthropic project that produces and sells artworks and editions to benefit artists and arts non-profits.

Begun in 2019, Alexandra Grant’s new paintings annunciate exuberance and transformation through physicality, abstraction, and language, forming complex psychological landscapes. Beginning with archived paint pours, an accretion of paint has slowly built up over years, incorporating screen printing, stenciling, spray paint, and an unquantifiable amount of singular brush marks. These painted dots flutter across the nooks and crannies of every surface, sometimes channeling themselves into triangles, stripes, letters, or amorphous shapes, they pile up—changing colors one on top of another like blinking lights, pulsating energy, or afterimages. These concentrations of pigment and matter create the illusion of looking through a dense forest, the dappled light playing tricks on perception. Titles like Jardin de deseo, Atlantis, and Bougainvillea (all works are from 2021) evoke utopic gardens from the past and future—spaces for love, time, creativity, reverie, and freedom.

Growing from within Grant’s ongoing Antigone 3000 series, these boisterous paintings and new neon text works continue to echo the words of Sophocles’ protagonist Antigone, I was born to love and not to hate—a radical and poetic defiance of authoritarian power and systemic oppression made while mourning the death of her brother. In Grant’s works, each word of this proclamation stands singular on a line, before bending acrobatically backwards to mirror itself—a gesture to Rorschach inkblots, self-reflection, and perhaps even binary fission—love begets love, according to the artist and her subject. Grant allows language to build, multiply, and fall apart in celebration of ever-shifting intellectual growth and spiritual development—embracing change as a formal structure and love as a logic that can’t quite be pinned down.

Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles-based artist who through an exploration of the use of text and language in various media—painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography—probes ideas of translation, identity, dis/location, and social responsibility. Grant frequently collaborates with other creative luminaries including author Michael Joyce, actor Keanu Reeves, artist Channing Hansen, and the philosopher Hélène Cixous. In 2008, Grant founded the grantLOVE project, which has raised funds for arts-based non-profits and in 2017, she cofounded X Artists’ Books, a publishing house for artist-centered books.

Grant has exhibited widely at galleries including Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Ochi Gallery, Sun Valley, Idaho; Galerie Gradiva, Paris; Galerie Lelong, New York City; and Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York City; and at institutions such as Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA; The Broad Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, White Hot Magazine, Frieze, Art in America, and Artforum amongst others. Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Grant’s works are included in museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX.