Alexandra Grant

For her first solo museum exhibition in Germany, Ein Stern genügt, um an das Licht zu glauben (One star is enough to believe in the light), American artist Alexandra Grant has created eight monumental paintings inspired by eight women writers with a deep connection to German literature.

Grant, who lives in Los Angeles and Berlin, explores how communication functions across linguistic, literary, cultural, and gender boundaries. The works in her exhibition at the Neues Museum Nuremberg take as their starting point historical and contemporary writers with a direct connection to the city, such as Christina Ebner (1277–1356), Maria Catharina Stockfleth (1633–1692), and Gisela Elsner (1937–1992)—all of whom were born in Nuremberg—as well as Pauline Füg (b. 1983), who lives and works there. Grant also included Hélène Cixous (b. Oran, Algeria, 1937), Fatma Aydemir (b. Karlsruhe, Germany, 1986), Rasha Khayat (b. Dortmund, Germany, 1978), and Olivia Wenzel (b. Weimar, Germany, 1985) for their influence and thought on German writing.

Literature is a central element in Grant’s artistic practice: As co-founder of the publishing house X Artists’ Books, she deliberately navigates the space between art and publishing. In her artworks, she provides a platform for texts outside the book format. In this way, the roles of artist and publisher overlap. In doing so, she always asks herself who is granted a public voice and who remains traditionally excluded. For Grant, therefore, the focus on women writers is central. For a long time, writing—just like artistic practice—was considered the domain of “great men”. Grant’s exhibition counters this by featuring the voices of women writers who have made themselves heard despite societal constraints, a point that is also evident in the content of their work. The texts by the female authors selected by Grant address the reality of racial and sexual violence and rigid gender roles, but also highlight female role models, resilience, and the pursuit of one’s own path—often in defiance of existing norms and societal power structures. Hence the exhibition’s hopeful title: One Star Is Enough to Believe in the Light.

Many of these female authors move between languages: Some write in German but grew up multilingual; others consider German their native language but compose their texts in other languages. Grant herself spent her childhood between the United States, Mexico, and France. The experience of growing up between cultures that were neither her own nor her parents’ continues to shape Grant’s artistic thinking to this day. Accordingly, the text fragments in her works often appear in different languages. In this way, the artist also highlights the role that translations play in the reception of texts and questions the concept of a “native language”.

In the eight works created specifically for the exhibition, Grant combines painting and printmaking techniques, thereby drawing on Nuremberg’s history as a major center of book printing. Grant digitally edited the text excerpts—which she selected in consultation with the authors directly or their historical archives—setting them in special typefaces, distorting, squashing, bending, or mirroring them. The designs were then transferred via screen printing onto large-format sheets of paper, onto which Grant over- and under-painted with acrylic paint, layering on brightly-hued inks, pencil lines, and paint markers. In doing so, she responds to the printed texts, enveloping and expanding them. Some words become almost illegible as a result, while others are highlighted. In this way, text and painting merge into a new sensory unit that oscillates between text and image.