Meet the Artist
Aleksandra Mir is an internationally acclaimed Swedish-American Contemporary artist known for bold, concept-driven works that blur art, science and cultural history. Over a three-decade career, she has exhibited worldwide, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Venice Biennale, and her work is held in major public collections such as the Tate, Moderna Museet, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Her practice spans drawing, collage, performance and large-scale public projects, combining intellectual rigor with striking visual impact. These museum-collected works are now available as limited edition high-quality prints — offering collectors a rare opportunity to own editions by one of contemporary art’s most globally exhibited artists.
“That’s one small step
for art history,
one giant leap for a woman”
Mir watched Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon in 1969 as a two-year old living with her family behind the iron curtain in Communist Poland.
’The Moon landing was a momentous and unifying event. We couldn’t cross the Western national border but witnessed these far-far away images of humanity’s biggest leap together with the rest of the world population on the same type black-and-white TV’.
30 years later, as an artist living in New York, Mir sent Neil Armstrong the video of her work, First Woman on the Moon (1999). He replied with good humor and congratulations!
Mir’s Moon landing has since been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Royal Museums Greenwich, London, Vasarely Museum, Budapest and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, among 60 other worldwide exhibitions.
The artwork was also embraced by the Space Industry: UK Space Conference, Liverpool, International Space University, Strasbourg and the International Astronautical Congress, Washington D. C.
Gravity
Mir has participated in over 370 art exhibitions in 40 countries with a diverse body of work, from live Drawing and ephemeral Performance to monumental Sculpture, Prints and Publications.
Transnationalism, Aviation and Space Exploration are recurring themes in her art that she delivers with an underlying playful irony and pathos.
‘My 22m rocket Gravity built out of scrap was obviously never going to go into outer space. It was a metaphor for what holds us back – social, political and mental gravity’.
On the Road
Since her family’s political exile to Sweden in the early 70s, Mir has continuously travelled and lived in diverse places: a tenement apartment in the East Village, New York, a palazzo in Palermo, Sicily, a commune on the island of La Gomera.
In between long periods on the road, she also held art residencies and created site-specific work in San Francisco, Vevey, Glasgow, Reykjavik, Stouffville, Porto Alegre, Sydney, Vejer de la Frontera, Mexico City, Hong Kong, and Antarctica.
A Collage Mentality
“The dadaists invented the artistic collage to describe a fractured society after WW1. I adopted a collage mentality as a way of creating unity between the fractured parts in my life”.
Cultural traditions are all manmade and made up of parts that can be endlessly combined into new stories and innovations. I take my liberty to use them all!’
An Education
Arriving in New York to study at the School of Visual Arts in 1989, with further studies in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, Mir eventually became known for her large scale collaborative projects and for her anthropological methods, involving rigorous archival research, oral history and field work.
On Location
‘Every location and circumstance has challenged me in new ways. I can be backpacking alone with a small drawing pad, striking a performative gesture with a friend, recruiting groups of collaborators to develop a large-scale exhibition together, doing a museum solo show with lots of resources or clearing red tape on an international airport tarmac – the mental effort to create a new work is the same’.
Witnessing
’Being an artist is for me not primarily about making, but ultimately about observing. I am constantly looking at old photographs to see what has changed. I am looking at the world around me to try to understand how it has been put together, who made it and why.
And then I add my two cents to it, simply as a marker of having been alive to witness’.
The Concept of Heaven
Mir spent 15 years in New York City and when she left for Sicily in 2005, she carried little but her library on Space and Astronomy with her, mainly as an anchor to her past.
‘When I arrived in Palermo, I soon befriended the gallerist Francesco Pantaleone who worked in his five-generations-old family catholic shop, selling everything from rosaries and candles to priest’s cloaks and large-scale church decorations, next to staging wild parties and contemporary art shows in his crumbling palazzo, close to where I lived in the historical center.
One day he visited my studio, saw me work on a collage and brought me to his shop’s warehouse where he handed me a box of antique communion certificates – a material gold mine!
That year I became obsessed with the concept of Heaven. I scoured the markets and sourced more antique materials from Italy, Spain, Ireland, Latin America and Eastern Europe, cut up all my Space and Astronomy books and the rest is Art History’.
A cluster of cherubs — putti, the chubby winged angels drawn from Renaissance and Baroque painting — surround an outer space rocket. Together they are launched into the blue heavens or perhaps all the way to outer space. This joyful Fine Art Print reproduces an original hand-cut paper collage by the artist Aleksandra Mir.
The new artwork combines source materials from antique religious and modern scientific imagery into a new physical and fantastical reality.
The cherubs, traditionally symbols of the divine and heavenly aspiration, have transferred their devotion from the sacred to the technological. The rocket becomes the new object of veneration — humanity's collective dream made metal. The old world meets the new in an incongruous but tender embrace.
Giclée pigment ink on Hahnemühle German Etching paper achieves a superior quality print with exceptional detail, vibrant color accuracy, and long-term durability. The fresh print reproduces an aged authentic patina and the imprint of the artist’s hand-crafted marks.
· Archival Museum Quality ·
· Limited Edition. 100 ·
· Certificate of Authenticity ·
· Hand & Human-Made without AI ·
· 100% Carbon Neutral ·
· Free Worldwide Shipping ·
Build Your Collection
Jesus Christ surrounded by a spectacular burst of rockets radiating outward like a halo of human striving — a Fine Art Print of an original hand-cut paper collage by Aleksandra Mir.
The new artwork combines source materials from antique religious and modern scientific imagery into a new fantastical reality. The source is a large format 19th century French devotional lithograph with the text AIMEZ-VOUS LES UNS LES AUTRES (Love one another).
Into this devotional image Aleksandra Mir has collaged an explosion of rockets — many different types from different eras and nations, recognisably including Saturn among them Saturn V, Indian PSLV, and various missiles — launching, soaring, and careening through clouds of fire and exhaust. Christ holds a rocket in one raised hand, imbuing the artwork with extraordinary compositional energy.
Giclée pigment ink on Hahnemühle German Etching paper achieves a superior quality print with exceptional detail, vibrant color accuracy, and long-term durability. The fresh print reproduces an aged authentic patina and the imprint of the artist’s hand-crafted marks.
· Archival Museum Quality ·
· Limited Edition. 100 ·
· Certificate of Authenticity ·
· Hand & Human-Made without AI ·
· 100% Carbon Neutral ·
· Free Worldwide Shipping ·
Two astronauts with the faces of Mary and Jesus Chris. This striking Fine Art Print reproduces an original hand-cut antique paper collage by the artist Aleksandra Mir.
The cleverly constructed collage and its title plays on Grant Wood's iconic 1930 painting American Gothic — but instead of a stern farmer and his wife standing before a Gothic-style house, we have two figures in gleaming silver NASA spacesuits from the early space age (Gemini-era, circa 1960s). Inside the helmet visors, replacing the astronauts' faces, are collaged Renaissance portraits from devotional religious paintings — The Madonna and Jesus Christ.
Aleksandra Mir has transported Wood’s original farm worker and his wife from rural America into the space race, and replaced their very identities with Old World sacred imagery. It's a witty commentary on American ambition, technology as a new religion, and the collision of the sacred and the scientific.
Giclée pigment ink on Hahnemühle German Etching paper results in a superior quality print with exceptional detail, vibrant color accuracy, and long-term durability. The fresh print reproduces an aged authentic patina and the imprint of the artist’s hand-crafted marks.
· Archival Museum Quality ·
· Limited Edition. 100 ·
· Certificate of Authenticity ·
· Hand & Human-Made without AI ·
· 100% Carbon Neutral ·
· Free Worldwide Shipping ·
An Italian First Communion certificate, framed with a delicate border of pink roses, gold ribbons and green ivy, becomes the setting for a Space Shuttle on its launch pad — bathed in golden floodlights against a dusky sky. This wondrous Fine Art Print reproduces an original hand-cut paper collage by the artist Aleksandra Mir.
The new artwork combines source materials from antique religious and modern scientific imagery into a new physical and fantastical reality. It is at once a collision and a communion of concepts. A certificate marking a child's most sacred rite of passage in Catholic tradition now enshrines the impending Space Shuttle launch as its holy image. Humanity’s launch into the universe is celebrated as a coming of age milestone.
The blank lines waiting to be filled in are deeply poignant — this could be anyone's communion with the cosmos. The roses and gold filigree frame the rocket with the same tenderness reserved for the divine. It's playful, warm and genuinely sweet.
Giclée pigment ink on Hahnemühle German Etching paper results in a superior quality print with exceptional detail, vibrant color accuracy, and long-term durability. The fresh print reproduces an aged authentic patina and the imprint of the artist’s hand-crafted marks.
· Archival Museum Quality ·
· Limited Edition. 100 ·
· Certificate of Authenticity ·
· Hand & Human-Made without AI ·
· 100% Carbon Neutral ·
· Free Worldwide Shipping ·
