Curated by Tiago Feijóo Pinto, and organized by Mirat Gallery and Rui Freire - Fine Art, in collaboration with the Oeiras City Hall.
"The photographer’s chronicles: thoughts become images 1992 | 2019" presents 180 black and white photographs, 100x150 cm, showcasing two decades of travel work through southern India, also passing through countries such as Morocco, Italy, Germany, China, Alaska, Russia, Cambodia, Yemen and Austria, where the artist was born, and France, where she lived. They are poetic, powerful, and intimate photographs that propose something beyond themselves. They speak of the possibility sustained by poetry, inscribed as they sometimes are, with quotes from great writers in whose work she is immersed. They portray Renate Graf's conversations with herself, art, and the world around her. They are in themselves a language that allows one to witness the experiences of people and the world.
Renate Graf traveled to remote places and through her camera sought to pursue the search for truth. Her photographs, printed through traditional methods, are the testimony of a world, and, according to her, should never be seen as something complete or conclusive. They are much more than an image, they are a language in themselves, they are signs, they have meaning in themselves. Renate Graf is inspired by poetry and literature, with Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tagore, T. S. Eliot, Edmond Jabès, Paul Valéry and Hermann Broch, conveying to her the meaning that an image can have. To these she also adds some filmmakers like Win Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Visconti and Tarkovsky, stating that “without literature, nature itself would be empty for me.”
While on the one hand, she sees human perception as the greatest achievement of evolution, she sees photography as responsible for capturing the most immediate evidence of perception.
In a unique way, Renate Graf transforms images into presences, through her unique gaze. She has exhibited in countries such as Austria, Germany, China, USA, France, among others, integrating important international collections, both institutional and private.
