Aleksandra Prints!
From a pioneering artist website to an independent print shop
25 Years ago, while making my way between a variety of day-jobs in Manhattan, I picked up my first computer on credit along with the book “Teach yourself html in 14 days”. Two weeks later I was coding first generation websites for two downtown arts organisations and registered my own domain – www.aleksandramir.info – by now one of the oldest artist’s websites in continuous operation.
As a young printmaker, zine publisher and performance artist who had already racked up a lot of travel miles working with non-profit and artist-run spaces in Copenhagen, Utrecht, Warsaw, NYC, London, LA, Pescara and Glasgow, I had long sensed a disconnect between the many things I was interested in and the many scenes I was part of.
My original aim with establishing a website was therefore to archive my art practice and communicate with colleagues across borders. When international curators also discovered the site, it effectively launched my professional career which by now counts participation in 370+ exhibitions and inclusion in some 30 museum collections worldwide.
Over the 25 years, the website itself grew to include 250 project pages, 4200 media elements (images/pdfs/videos/audio) and over 600 third party critical texts. 1,250.000 people have visited it to date.
Fast forward
This year, I registered my second domain – www.aleksandraprints.com – and things could not be more different.
We now live in a hyper-connected world where distant realities are streamed to us in real time. Creating a web presence requires no coding, but is a matter of intuition coupled with in my case hundreds of hours on tech support. Because while things have become much more accessible, they are also infinitely more complex, and for this analogue native, it is a lot more to catch up on.
This time, the scope is also much narrower. I am presenting only one project: The Space Age collages that juxtapose and unite spiritual imagery with space exploration themes, originally hand-cut from antique papers in my Palermo, Sicily studio. After 30 years as an exhibiting artist, I am now also offering museum-quality Limited Edition Art Prints directly to collectors.
The concept of Heaven
A collage can best be described as the combination of elements from different sources into a new image and reality. As such it seems easily done in the digital era and why not with AI? Sure, but in my case, there is so much more to it: The intention, the hand, the physical cutting, but also, the intricate process of researching and collecting source materials, an intellectual, physical and social endeavour.
The creation of the collages was preceded by years of gathering out of print outer space books and months of meticulous sourcing of antique religious prints, materials that could inform my new artworks with content and historical authority.
When I first arrived in Palermo from NYC in 2005, 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.
Who is this all for?
My audience are people who are interested in conversations around faith and spirituality while living grounded and material lives. People who may be part of the science community, and who care about more than the hard facts. Spiritual seekers and believers who are willing to go on a psychedelic journey with me further into the unknown. Fans of either Space Art, Spiritual Art or both. People who are comfortable navigating between seemingly contradictory worldviews only to find unity, like I do, for example in the pairing of a 1950s communion certificate with a more recent NASA photograph of a rocket launch. Everything is related, but how? My images make some of these obscure relationships tangible.
Thank you
The possibility to run an independent web-shop online allows for an unprecedented opportunity for an artist to make a living outside of traditionally representative systems, to fully narrate their own story and to serve the public directly to own meaningful art for their home. It requires a lot more work and offers an amazing freedom.
So with this first post I wish to thank everyone who inspired my inquiry and who helped bring this website to life, including all my BETA testers who thoroughly explored it, ordered test prints and gave invaluable feedback. You know who you are!
And we are LIVE!
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 funny without being disrespectful.
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 ·
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 ·
Jesus Christ surrounded by a spectacular burst of rockets radiating outward like a halo of human striving — this is one of the most powerful images in the series, a Fine Art Print of 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 source is a large format 19th century French devotional lithograph with the text AIMEZ-VOUS LES UNS LES AUTRES (Love one another).
Into this solemn image Aleksandra Mir has collaged an explosion of rockets — many different types from different eras and nations, recognisably including Saturn V, Indian PSLV, and various missiles — launching, soaring and careening in every direction around the figure. Explosions of fire and exhaust clouds fill the background. Christ holds a rocket in one raised hand, imbuing the artwork with extraordinary compositional energy.
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 ·
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 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 ·