Recent Acquisitions
Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland — Lannan Foundation Santa Fe, NM — Parrish Art Museum Watermill, NY — New Britain Museum of American Art New Britain, CT — New Mexico Museum of Art Santa Fe, N.M., USA — Chazen Museum of Art Madison, WI — George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film - Rochester, NY, USA — National Gallery of Art Washington, DC — Hamburger Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany — Yale University Art Gallery New Haven, CT, USA (from the Nancy and Robinson Grover art collection) — HBC Global Art Collection New York, NY, USA — New York Historical Society Museum New York, NY, USA
"Renate Aller did not set out to become a landscape photographer, but she is now among the leaders of those photographic artists who are rethinking the genre at a time of environmental and political upheaval. Her photographs are on view at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont through February 12, in an exhibition titled The Space Between Memory and Expectation, which is also the title of a new book from Kehrer Verlag."
Lyle Rexer, Photograph Magazine, 1 December 2022
"In March 2020, photographer Renate Aller found herself among the group of New Yorkers who decided to ride out lockdown in the city. By April, her urge to connect with others took over and she began inviting friends, one at a time, to join her on the sidewalk in Soho, all from six feet apart. Photographing each of her encounters, many of which were the first social interactions her friends had experienced since before lockdown, Aller produced a series of images that capture the anxiety and uncertainty of the early pandemic days, as well as the resilience of New Yorkers. A monument to how society adapted, the exhibition offers a cautious dose of optimism that we are far enough from the dark days of the pandemic to be able to meaningfully reflect on them, but simultaneously reserves space for losses, changes and lingering uncertainty."
Annabel Keenan, The Art Newspaper, 25 March 2022
“Soon after the term “social distancing” entered the language, the photographer Renate Aller decided to document what staying six feet apart from other people looked like. She invited friends over, one at a time, or invited herself to where they live. Either way, she stayed outside. She placed two chairs on the sidewalk in front of her building in SoHo — or theirs, when she went visiting — and put her camera across the street, setting the timer to take nine shots, with three seconds between each one.”
James Barron, The New York Times, 22 March 2022
"...The artist’s key interest is in “creating an experience for the viewer to enter a space and be embraced and held by a continuous landscape”. This can be captured by the juxtaposition of images. Indeed, each image seems to have a relationship of continuity based on details, colors and shapes with the image that precedes it. From here, we can realize Renate Aller’s need to be in control of her own narrative. Thanks to Renate Aller’s pictures, we relive a common experience with greater awareness: the landscape as a mirror of ourselves—filled with illusions, desire, and nostalgia—and as a fulfillment of our idealized self.”..."
By Angelica Cantù Rajnoldi, editor Jana Massoud, Musée Magazine, 4 February 2022
"It is not only about transience, even if the consequences of climate change are unmistakably documented in many of the photos. Rather, the images more so convey something of the strength and power, with which the continental plates push against and over one another. Last but not least, they resemble the expedition photographs of the nineteenth century, when American photographers inspired by the theory of “catastrophism” interpreted downright, mountains and deserts in their photographs as the result of tectonic battles. Renate Aller does not console us with nature when she depicts worn rock or fragmented icebergs precisely down to the last detail and presents them as primal substance rather than landscape..."
Freddy Langer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 January 2022
