BETWEEN BEASTS AND ANGELS

Home Apocalypse takes us into the present and its social isolation imposed by the pandemic and enables us to rethink and deconstruct historical cultural paradigms in the context of everyday life with the help of technology. Using this new application, viewers have the opportunity to transform their homes and turn them into transit zones where the real world exists in incredible symbiosis with virtual reality.

The creation of the application has an important background. In 2012 Dennis Rudolph decided to go into the Mojave Desert in California to update Rodin's Gates to Hell in California City - a failed urban development project in the middle of nowhere. With the invention of affordable VR headsets in 2017 he was finally able to paint Das Portal in a virtual reality 3D painting program and place it with a GPS based app onto the Desert Butte in California City. This solution fulfilled the concept of the work being on the threshold between two realities: Heaven and Hell or Virtual Reality and Reality. Dealing with the new medium of VR completely changed his artistic practice, pushing the focus on the materialization of the digital into classical forms of art such as oil painting and bronze casting from 3D prints. His current series takes its inspiration from the oil painting of the Baroque, incorporating for example details from Cortona’s ceiling fresco Il Trionfo Della Divina Provvidenza into new contexts.

This work is an update of the App The 5 Minute Apocalypse originally commisioned by Oude Kerk, Amsterdam.

 

Dennis Rudolph is a multimedia artist working primarily in augmented reality, virtual reality and painting. His artistic practice derives its primal momentum from a melancholic reworking of the heritage of western culture. Conceiving contemporary art in relation to this backward gaze, Rudolph picks up topics associated with unfinished works of mourning. Rudolph lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Language and Cultural Institute in Beijing, the Imperial College of Art in St. Petersburg and the Berlin University of Arts, where he graduated in 2004. Since 2004 his work has been on show in galleries in Europe and the US such as: Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, Lily Robert, Paris, Kunstverein Arnsberg, DAZ, Berlin, Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin, Concord, L.A., Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, NY, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, KW, Berlin and many others.
https://dennisrudolph.com/