Reviewed: Renate Aller at Adamson Gallery
(excerpt)

Renate Aller’s previous show at Adamson Gallery—a decade’s worth of sea-and-sky photographs taken from the same point on southern Long Island—was rousing success, offering hyper-real portrayals within ever-changing atmospheric conditions….Aller’s new exhibit,…titled “dicotyledon,” after a flowering plant that grows in pairs,… Aller’s new work places two contrasting images side by side, typically one larger-scale landscape and one more targeted depiction, such as an animal. Aller asks viewers to “make the connections of multiple experiences,”… “Plate #5” features an elephant-gray tableau of gnarled roots and rocky outcroppings, with a wisp of green so enigmatic it’s hard to tell whether it’s natural or a stray bit of trash. Aller’s finest piece in the exhibit is a six-part, almost cubist photographic matrix depicting tree branches and sky, shown in bright sun and limned in lovely shades of beige and ice blue….The exhibition is on view 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m Tuesday to Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday to May 31 at Adamson Gallery, 1515 14th St.

photography installation by Renate Aller
exhibition opening Saturday, March 24th 2012

March 24 – May 31

Adamson Gallery
1515, 14th Street
Washington DC

dicotyledon photo installation by Renate Aller, Adamson Gallery, Washington DC

Waterscapes: Photographs from the Collection

March 23, 2012

curated by Kate Ware

Renate Aller, August 31, 2007  (from the series Oceanscapes: One View – Ten Years)
40 x 60 in
Gift of Thomas Damsgaard, 2010

A selection of gems from the permanent collection, this exhibition of photographs highlights images of water by artists including Renate Aller, Wynn Bullock, Paul Caponigro, Linda Connor, Laura Gilpin, Wanda Hammerbeck, and Eliot Porter.

Santa Fe, N.M.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Invitation to an Exhibition: Let the Mentoring Begin

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Courtesy of Renate Aller

SELECTIONS A print from Renate Aller’s “Oceanscapes” series, from “Artists Choose Artists” at the Parrish Art Museum.

Juried exhibitions, in which the works have been selected from a pool of submissions, used to be more common, although artists have long expressed conflicted feelings about them. They are one of the best ways for little-known artists to get their work shown in major museums or galleries, yet charges of favoritism and nepotism have dogged juried exhibitions for centuries.

“Artists Choose Artists,” the second such show at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, tweaks the model: works by the exhibition’s seven East End jurors appear alongside those of the local artists they selected; each juror has chosen two artists out of more than 200 submissions.

A photograph at the entrance shows participating artists (minus a few) lined up casually against a wall, engaged in what seem to be collegial conversations. (Or, perhaps, conversations staged for the camera.) A similar type of communication, arranged for the gallery, occurs among the artworks. Within each grouping, one can see certain threads and themes emerge.

One of the jurists, Alice Aycock, is a sculptor who works on a monumental scale, creating objects and installations that draw on modern architecture and explore systems and cosmologies. Ms. Aycock is represented in the exhibition by a little aluminum sculpture — little by her standards — called “Twist of Fate,” from 2011, whose elements mimic the turns and shifts of destiny. One of the artists she has chosen, Kryn Olson, paints moody, visceral canvases that offer possible explanations for how we see and experience the world. “Dream House,” from 2010, is a deep red canvas with a scrawled house that looks almost like a rocket taking off. Mike Solomon, Ms. Aycock’s other choice, is represented by “GO,” from 2005, a sculpture made of net, fiberglass and resin that looks like a wave curling out from the wall.

Courtesy of Ross Bleckner

Ross Bleckner’s “Separated by a Curtain.”

The artists chosen by Ross Bleckner, a painter known for canvases that hover between abstraction and representation, display an ethereal quality similar to his own, except in photographs rather than paint. Mr. Bleckner’s “Separated by a Curtain,” from 2010, is a large canvas with fuzzy concentric circles reminiscent of an iris and pupil. The three images from Renate Aller’s series “Oceanscapes — One View: 1999 to Present,” from 2009, are similarly spectral and evocative, with swirling masses of clouds dwarfing the slivers of sea at the bottom of the photographs.

Like Mr. Bleckner, Gary Simmons, another juror, employs smearing effects in the outlined objects in his elegantly minimal paintings. (At one time, he worked on chalkboards.) His work has often used blurring and erasure as a metaphor for the social treatment of certain racial and ethnic groups. (Mr. Simmons, who is of African descent, was born in Barbados.)

Perry Burns and Melinda Hackett, Mr. Simmons’s choices for the exhibition, follow some of these strands. Mr. Burns’s collage-paintings are made from photographs of protesters — the titles, “Bolsheviks” and “Revolution #10,” both from 2011, give you an idea — that disintegrate into pixelated grids at the bottom of the frame. Ms. Hackett’s paintings are exuberant, decorative fields. All they would need is one good swipe with a squeegee to look like Mr. Simmons’s “You, Me, Him & Her,” from 2008, a canvas with arabesque shapes drawn in white outline and blurred onto a deep blue ground.

Occasionally, the jurors’ selections run distinctly against the grain. For instance, the naïve, garish paintings of Nella Khanis would probably end up at the bottom of many jurors’ lists, but they made the cut with Agathe Snow, the youngest juror in the pool at 35, who is a noted denizen of downtown New York. (She was married to the artist Dash Snow, although they had divorced by the time he died of a drug overdose in 2009.) This makes sense, though, since paintings like Ms. Khanis’s bright still life “Bite Me!” from 1993, which features a multicolored fish on a platter, look perfectly at home alongside Ms. Snow’s 2011 mobile with papier-mâché divers and a shark, hanging from curtain rods and suspended from the ceiling; its title is “there’s always a first time for everything.”

Ms. Snow’s other selection, Alice Hope, seems a little tamer — although Ms. Hope’s Web site thanks “supporters” like the apparently fictional Institute of Aesthetics = Magnetism and WD-40 XXX. Ms. Hope’s “Shifting,” from 2011, is a wall smothered in chains and ferrite magnets.

The exhibition leans heavily toward painting and sculpture, although Matthew Satz, a maker of hybrid works that incorporate materials like tar, feathers and smoke, made a leap by choosing Liliya Lifanova. Ms. Lifanova is a fairly young artist (she is 28), and her extremely stylish and well-produced videos recall upscale science-fiction movies and the films of Matthew Barney, but they don’t seem to be saying much of anything. Mr. Satz’s other choice, Terry Elkins, offers a painting that could serve as a pendant piece to Ms. Aller’s “Oceanscapes” photographs: a long triptych with a wave creeping toward the viewer, titled “Atlantic Beach,” from 1995.

Two other artists, Dan Rizzie and Frank Wimberley, made selections that complement their fairly traditional painting practices. Mr. Rizzie’s simple black-and-white panels, featuring “5 Barns/Black,” from 1979, are answered copacetically by Ross Watts’s and Tad Wiley’s geometric works, also on wood.

Mr. Wimberley’s “Watchtower for a Clock Stopp’d,” from 2002, is a deeply textured, mostly black-and-white painting with a coarse surface. Julie Small-Gamby also explores texture and surface with canvases that include T-shirts attached and painted onto them, while Fulvio Massi’s works are covered with masses of marks and doodles that suggest, but never resolve themselves into, leaves and eyes and other objects.

A museum statement accompanying “Artists Choose Artists” said the exhibition was designed to “encourage engagement and mentorship among local artists.” One wonders, with some of these pairings, if this will really be the case. Will Ms. Snow and Ms. Khanis begin hobnobbing or exchanging studio visits? It seems unlikely. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Mr. Massi, a seasoned, exhibiting painter, taking tips from Mr. Wimberley (although Mr. Wimberley, at 85, is nearly 30 years his senior).

More likely, the relationships forged in the process of the show, which included visits by jurists to the studios of those they selected, will follow the model of the photograph hung at the entrance: a few conversations will develop; some artists will make an effort to encourage and mentor. But for the sake of this exhibition, the conversations that really matter are the ones that take place on the wall.

“Artists Choose Artists” is at the Parrish Art Museum, 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton, through Oct. 9. Information: (631) 283-2118; parrishart.org.

A version of this review appeared in print on September 25, 2011, on page LI6 of the New York edition with the headline: Invitation to an Exhibition: Let the Mentoring Begin.

September 1, 2011

Artists Choose Artists at the Parrish Art Museum

By Liz Marcus

Ross Bleckner chose Renate Aller – From the series Oceanscapes: One View, 1999–Present, 2007, Archival pigment print, edition 1 of 3, 44 x 64 inches, Courtesy of the artist

On view at the Parrish Art Museum is its second juried Artists Choose Artists exhibition, wherein seven well-established East End artists each choose two lesser-known East End artists from a pool of 200 submissions. This year’s jury included Alice Aycock, Ross Bleckner, Dan Rizzle, Matthew Satz, Gary Simmons, Agathe Snow and Frank Wimberly.

I had the opportunity to put some questions to Ross Bleckner and Gary Simmons.

…..”LM: … Aller shooting the exact same scene of sky and water for ten years….. I can see a lot of similarities between your work and themes like the passage of time, memory and loss, embodied in objects going in and out of focus and attention to light and atmosphere.

Ross Bleckner: I was attracted to both of their work because of the way in which they capture place in a complementary way. First both of them are extremely accomplished with the medium, which I respect, and because of that are able to use it in a very evocative way. That sense of stillness and movement in a photo in opposite ways was very inspiring. In one, waves and landscape changing over time, and in the other pages, turning and narrative shifting are like identity…momentary, transient, present, always shifting. In both photographers I got the feeling that what they were looking at they were looking at very closely: waves and pages as an investigation of time spent and time past. In my own work I try to find the variations of an image between its conception and fragmentation: how it begins and how it ends, its place as an interior space (i.e. cells) and its exterior (i.e cosmos, flowers, stars, sky, abstraction) all states of its being are connected so that finding a way to find an image is like the image itself going from being concrete to dissolving…like water from steam to ice.

LM: The East End has been populated by artists for well over a century. The quality of light is often quoted as the reason so many painters have set up studios there and I’m sure that’s true. But what I am so aware of when I come out is the much more relaxed pace, the decompression from city living, and how that creates a mental, emotional and physical expansion. Does that ring true for you? How has working out on the East End affected your work as well as the artists you’ve chosen for this show?

GS: I would definitely agree especially with pace and decompression from the city. I think the city has a very different kind of energy that an artist responds to and the east end is a slower more contemplative place to conceptualize a project or body of work. I think its a great balance to have if you have to opportunity to have both as a place to produce work.

RB: I think the artists that I have chosen for the show would be able to answer that question better then i can (decompression etc). I myself always feel slightly anxious: and although the Hamptons can feel like NYC transplanted sometimes, being near the ocean is calming, especially after labor day. The light might have some effect on my work, but I’m not really aware of it which is in fact what i like. It must effect me somehow but since I usually know what I want to do when I’m in my studio I’m not sure of what does and doesn’t effect me….I look at my (previous) work and images mainly and try not to get to effected by what’s around me, although I’m sure I am.

LM: When I came out to Southampton to cover the Parrish Art Museum’s Mid Summer Gala for the Huffington Post, I spent time with local artists Matthew Satz and Michael Combs and I was struck by the high priority the Parrish sets on being inclusive and supportive of local artists even while it expands its reach and reputation as a world class museum. How do you see your role, as a very established artist vis-a-vis the lesser known artists working in the East End?

GS: I agree, i think the Parrish is really interested in bring artists together and really that’s the most interesting thing about being involved with them and a show like Artists Choose Artists. At the end of the day we’re all artists and we’re interested in ideas and image making…that’s the common denominator and the folks at the Parrish recognize that and support it. It’s been really enjoyable and a honor to be a part of the process for an exhibition like this.

RB: I think it’s important that the Parrish, like any public institution, maintain itself as a vital voice in the community. In order to be truly relevant it’s important to always be on the look out for what young artists are thinking and doing. Let’s not fool ourselves, it’s very hard for young artists to get started anywhere, if they have chosen, for whatever reason, to be out in the Hamptons only, it is even harder, especially through what seems like the endless winters. Any help they can get is a blessing. They need all the encouragement they can get…I’m glad to be able to offer some when and how I can and I’m glad that the Parrish does that as well.

I just want to mention one piece I was particularly struck by, longtime surfer and artist Mike Solomon’s fiberglass wave, GO, which hung from the ceiling so that it curled over the people standing nearby. It’s a minimal piece but somehow I get the feeling that it would never getting old even if one lived with it for years, which is what I’d like to do.

The Parrish has also put together videos of each chosen artist in their studios and it gives a great idea of what it’s like to work out on the East End.

By Steve Parks    steve.parks@newsday.com
Parrish Art Museum exhibition opening

Photo credit: Renate Aller Photo/ | This Renate Aller seascape selected by Ross Bleckner will be part of the “Artists Choose Artists” exhibit at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, through Oct. 9, 2011.

The Parrish Art Museum opens what’s likely to be the final summer exhibition — ever — at its Southampton village jewel-box location with a forward-looking “Artists Choose Artists” juried show Saturday evening.

Seven established artists with East End connections served as jurors, each selecting two emerging or recently emerged artists — also from the East End — from 200 online submissions. The jurors narrowed their choices to four artists each and, following studio visits, selected the final 14. “Artists Choose Artists,” coordinated by associate Parrish curator Andrea Grover, is composed of one artwork by each juror alongside two or three pieces by the two artists he or she selected. ”The online part was blind,” says Grover of the initial winnowing. “The artists only had to certify their 119 ZIP code prefix” — proving that they lived somewhere east of Yaphank. “So the show is quite democratic.”

JURY OF THEIR PEERS Although Sagaponack juror Ross Bleckner is a painter renowned for his canvases reflecting loss and remembrance, he chose two photographers: Renate Aller of Westhampton Beach, who shoots South Shore seascapes, and Wainscott’s Mary Ellen Bartley, who specializes in abstract close-ups of books. Sag Harbor Abstract Expressionist Frank Wimberley chose a fellow painter who mixes figurative and abstract elements, Fulvio Massi of Bridgehampton, and Julie Small-Gamby of East Hampton, who applies unusual materials to her mixed-media canvases. Sag Harbor collage artist Dan Rizzie was drawn to Tad Wiley’s painted-wood abstract architectural forms created on Shelter Island, plus fellow Sag Harbor artist Ross Watts’ conceptual works. Gary Simmons of Southampton, known for pop-icon reflections on class and race, selected Amagansett’s Perry Burns and his Abstract Expressionist paintings imbued with Islamic patterns, along with Southampton’s Melinda Hackett and her colorfully whimsical abstract paintings. East Hampton’s Matthew Satz, who experiments with drip and smoke paintings, found refuge in the en plein-air landscapes of Bridgehampton artist Terry Elkins, and the performance-art material creations of Amagansett’s Liliya Lifanova.

LADIES’ CHOICE Agathe Snow of Cutchogue, known for collaborative works in myriad media, was fascinated by the vibrant colors Mattituck’s Nella Khanis applies in transforming the mundane into the remarkable, as well as mixed-media wall pieces of East Hampton’s Alice Hope, who works with unseen natural forces such as magnetism. Invisible forces also inspire the paintings of Sag Harbor’s Kryn Olson, selected by site-specific sculptor/installation artist Alice Aycock. The Sag Harbor artist was also impressed by the sinuous wall sculptures that reflect the surfing passion of East Hampton’s Mike Solomon.

The Parrish is scheduled to relocate in July to its airy and spacious new museum space in nearby Water Mill.

WHEN | WHERE Opening reception 6 p.m. Saturday, through Oct. 9 at Parrish Art Museum, 25 Job’s Lane, Southampton; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 12, Thursdays-Mondays thereafter

INFO $5, $3 seniors, students, free for children younger than 18, active-duty military, (reception $10); parrishart.org   631-283-2118

curated by Alicia Longwell and Andrea Grover
August 21st – October 9th 2011

Gallery talk : September 17th, 2pm

25 Jobs Lane, Southampton, NY 11968

Ross Bleckner, Renate Aller and Terrie Sultan at the Parrish Art Museum Opening

Born in Germany, Renate Aller lives and works in New York City and on the South Shore of Long Island. The long term project “Oceanscapes – One View – Ten Years” was a critic’s choice by Nord Wennerstrom for ArtForum, and was reviewed by Vince Aletti for The New Yorker. Pieces from that series and other site specific art works are in the collections of corporate institutions, private collectors and museums, including The Yale University Art Gallery, the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany, the Chazen Museum of Art / University of Wisconsin, Madison, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, N.M., New Britain Museum of American Art, CT. Book on Oceanscapes co-published by Radius Books of Santa Fe and Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg December 2010.

Curated by Anne Lyden, Associate Curator, The J.P. Getty Museum, LA

From the series “Oceanscapes – One View – Ten Years” , January 2007, Permanent collection Museum Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany. Copyright Renate Aller.

Opening reception August 13th, 2011 6-10 pm
LYCEUM THEATRE GALLERY
Curated by Anne Lyden, Associate Curator, The J.P. Getty Museum, LA

Andrea Abati, Prato #5, 2000

Luigi Ghirri, Renate Aller, Olivo Barbieri, Guido Guidi, Vittore Fossati, Vincenzo Castella, Andrea Abati, Dennis Marsico, Thomas Ruff, Francesca Woodman, Toshio Shibata, Sakiko Nomura, Kazuko Wakayama, Hiroto Fujimoto, Marco Signorini, Fabio Casati, Marco Baroncelli, Filippo Maggia, Carmelo Nicosia, Paolo Bernabini, Shao Yinong & Muchen, Shimabuku, Connie Dekker, Gea Casolaro, Zheng Guogu, Giovanni Ozzola, Robert Pettena, Margherita Verdi, Rita Linz, Tancredi Mangano, Michael Schmidt, Nobuyoshi Araki, Renate Aller, Andreoni e Fortugno, Natalie Magnan, Margot Pilz, Alessandro Mencarelli, Stefania Balestri, Mariette Schiltz, Stefano Boccalini, Paola Di Bello.

18 May – 16 June 2011

Closing party Thursday 16 June 5 pm – 12 pm, cocktail 8 pm

locations
Dryphoto arte contemporanea via Pugliesi 23
Torre della Buca via Pugliesi 21
Ozne Pub via Pugliesi 35
Caffè Zero via Giuseppe Garibaldi 65

hours
Wednesday–Saturday from 5pm to 8pm

press release
Moving is an exhibition in progress that narrates the story of the space and also represents its present situation. From 18 May to 16 June, a period of thirty days, correspondig to the 30-year activity of the via Pugliesi 23 space, works, selected from those who have shown work at Dryphoto from 1981 to today, will be positioned in the gallery. The works will accumulate gradually, forming the complete exhibition on 16 June. The artists have been chosen from those who have accompanied and/or marked a particular moment of reflection in our work. The exhibition offers an overview of the history of the gallery, but also of the history of photography over the last thirty years.At the beginning of the gallery’s activity, we were involved in debates, seminars, workshops and exhibitions regarding both the technical and the linguistic aspects of the photographic medium.
The early years, represented by the works of Luigi Ghirri, Olivo Barbieri, Guido Guidi, Vittore Fossati, Vincenzo Castella and Andrea Abati, were mostly devoted to Italian photography of the 1970s and 1980s, the kind of work that made a clear break with the past, based on full linguistic awareness of the potential of the medium. The American photographer Dennis Marsico, on the other hand, with his dye transfers, tells of the research on techniques of conservation of photographic color prints. These were the years in which photography achieved full status as an art medium, and Dryphoto began to collaborate not only with photographers but also with artists who make use of photography, as their only medium or among other media, like Thomas Ruff and Francesca Woodman.
Our particular concentration, during a certain period, on Japanese photography is reflected by the works of Toshio Shibata, Sakiko Nomura, Kazuko Wakayama and Hiroto Fujimoto.
From the intense workshop activities, we have chosen pieces by Marco Signorini, Fabio Casati and Marco Baroncelli, with whom we have actively worked and discussed projects at some length.
Filippo Maggia, Carmelo Nicosia and Paolo Bernabini took part, in 1997, in the exhibition “l’invito non è strettamente personale”, where the necessity of getting out of the gallery, out of delegated art spaces, became clear for the first time. This necessity then met with a concrete response in the project “Spread in Prato” curated by Pier Luigi Tazzi; among the artists who participated in that project, the present show includes works by Shao Yinong & Muchen, Shimabuku, Connie Dekker, Gea Casolaro, Zheng Guogu.
The works by Giovanni Ozzola and Robert Pettena, on the other hand, reference “Pretesti”, the publishing and exhibition project curated by Pier Luigi Tazzi, an interesting experience of encounter between public and private patronage.
The exhibition also includes works by artists with whom we have shared projects and reflections: Natalie Magnan, Margot Pilz, Margherita Verdi, Rita Linz, Tancredi Mangano, Michael Schmidt, Stefania Balestri, Andreoni & Fortugno, Nobuyoshi Araki, Renate Aller, Alessandro Mencarelli, Mariette Schiltz, Stefano Boccalini, Paola Di Bello.The exhibition will be completed on the closing evening, Friday 16 June, when we will have a chance to greet all the friends who want to share this experience with us, and meet again in September in our new facility at Via delle Segherie 33°, Prato, Italy.

info
Dryphoto arte contemporanea
via Pugliesi 23 – 59100 Prato
info@dryphoto.it
+39 0574.604939
Dryphoto arte contemporanea is moving to via delle Segherie 33/a, 59100 Prato tel. +39 0574603186

“ Oceanscapes – One View – Ten Years “

by Jasmin Seck

Water and it’s elemental forces have always been, artistic indicators for self-experience and self-loss. Images of the ocean determine the iconographic nature of the history of art. The sea has remained to this day one of the archetypal natural landscapes of our planet and therefore has not lost any of its enchantment. The ocean: a collective metaphor and a space of projection for our longings and desires. Therefore, on first encounter, Renate Aller’s Oceanscapes appear so familiar to us. What we are seeing is nothing new, but how it is presented to us is what makes the difference.

Renate Aller, from the series ‘Oceanscapes - One View - Ten Years’, 2008. The photographer captured this Long Island viewpoint over the decade.

With an eye for detail and an accomplished technique, Aller knows how to capture the full chromatic spectrum of nature in all its breathtaking variety. In some images, there is an interplay of clouds and reflections on the surface of the water. In others, the roughened surface of the ocean transforms itself into a metallic sandy desert, a silvery moonscape, a glittering diamond field, or a crusted icy plane. It is the light, above all else, giving the images their powerful color and creating unique textures.

The ever-changing horizon in the individual pieces reminds us of the swaying amplitude in a piece of music. Aller’s ocean compositions appear to be visualizing the universal rhythms of life: ebb and tide, coming and going, life and death – an endless melody. She constructs mental images and raises sensory issues highly reminiscent of the ideology and concepts of the 19th century with her sublime oceanscapes. Something of the sublimity of the great romantic landscape paintings, especially those of Caspar David Friedrich clearly oscillates in her iconography of melancholy and silence. The absence of Friedrich’s familiar rear-view figure demands an even greater need for the active presence of the viewer.

Aller’s works present us with visual experiences of striking activity, in which landscape becomes the stage: nature performs it’s dramatic spectacle of life and death – everything is in a permanent process of renewal. Her point of view is as well renewed at every moment. In her opinion it is unavoidable and necessary that humans adapt constantly and akin to their environment. Therefore she will, most likely, never stop the creation of these impressive images of the ocean.