Alexandra Grant: Antigone 3000 (Anakainōsis)

New York, NY | albertz benda is pleased to present Antigone 3000 (Anakainōsis), Alexandra Grant's first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view from May 21 through July 03, 2026, the show features new paintings and works on paper from Grant’s long-term investigation into Sophocles’ myth of Antigone.

Begun in 2014 as a series of large-scale works on paper combining painting, collage and wax rubbings, the Antigone 3000 works have morphed into paintings on canvas through the artist's use of screen printing of text and using a squeegee to manipulate paint across the surface.

Throughout, Grant employs a visual language that translates the Greek myth into painting: lines representing the rule of law; pours and splashes to show the more ecstatic, expressionistic messiness of real life; and, interspersed throughout this painterly language, the phrase "I was born to love not to hate." This line from Sophocles' play is sometimes mirrored, sometimes fractured, or even partially obscured within the compositions. Antigone utters it as she stands up to her uncle, who refuses to give Antigone's brother Polynices an equal burial after a war of succession, and for which she is sentenced to death. Grant's paintings map the characters, their motivations, desires and interactions as a painted choreography.

Like many before her, Grant turned to the story of Antigone to help make sense of the political, cultural and personal contexts of her lifetime, the phrase ultimately becoming a personal mantra. Now Grant asks us to contemplate with her: what happens if the mantra works?

For these final works of the series, the artist chose the title Anakainōsis - a Greek term that speaks of renewal: not in the additive sense of self-improvement, but of the possibility of reaching a higher, positive state through the destruction of the past self. The lines, pours and texts disintegrate into explosive fireworks of form and color: the end is a new beginning. Antigone, in dying, achieved immortality as a character, made new by each generation. In her 2022 poem "Antigone," Giannina Braschi wrote:

"It is the body politic persisting, insisting it has a body of work and muscles to train—and trains to catch—and it wants to rise in love—and raise humanity to a higher quality of itself—and it doesn't want to leave us without a body of work to complete its masterpiece. Don't even try to take Antigone from gone. Anti is the body of work that doesn't want to leave everything unfinished before it is time to go away. And when gone comes to take anti away from body—body will manifest itself as a protest of antagonism—and contradiction—contrasting gone with the spirit of rain and wind—and flesh with earth and fire. Here, keep the torch alive!"