RENATE GRAF
EINE REISE DURCH INDIEN
Opening: 2. September 2014, 19h
Exhibition Duration: 3. – 25. September 2014
Galerie Krinzinger ist presenting the photo works by the austrian born Artist Renate Graf.The Photographs were taken on her numerous travels including the ones together with her husband the german artist Anselm Kiefer.
For many years her own work as an artist has been private. She has not presumed to present what she calls “these conversations with myself, art and the world around me” to a wider public. “I am an amateur”, she decrees and so for twenty years she has kept her work for the eyes of friends. But now others are determined to change this situation.
Since the recent publication of a compilation of her photographs and writings by Jose Alvarez the founder and editor at Les Editions du Regard in Paris, a new audience has discovered her work. exhibitions of prints at Pierre Passebon’s Galerie du Passage in Paris and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome have followed.“
Indeed there is nothing amateur about her quest to make her photographs resolutely as she wishes. She has pursued her life’s researches to far-flung places, and explored them through her camera. She has insisted upon her work being printed from traditional negatives onto Hungarian photographic paper by the hand of a master printer in a darkroom in India. And her prints deliver the aesthetic of all the skill, craft and history and alchemy of darkroom photography that digital photography seeks increasingly to deliver by stealth.”
I am not a photographer” she insists, “ my images exist to serve a different purpose from those of any true photographer, they are neither complete nor conclusive.” They are certainly not examples of Henri Cartier Bresson’s “decisive moment”. Rather she sees them, “Not as image, but as language, as signposts pointing towards meaning.”. Her photographs do not define; they witness. They speak of possibility, sustained by poetry, inscribed as they often are with quotes from the great writers in whose work she is immersed.
“Sometimes its true that I feel the image first and only later I can complete it with words. Perhaps my more abstract images require longer for me to connect them with others. Sometimes I have to travel with an image for a while, or feel what lies beyond it, before it can settle, or perhaps I just need to wait until it connects itself to another image or group, to map its journey.”
