Dennis Rudolph "The Holy War, Chapter One: The Sacrifice of Youth"
Perry Rubenstein Gallery (527 West 23rd Street)
This event has ended.
Perry Rubenstein Gallery presents The Holy War, Chapter One: The Sacrifice of Youth, the first New York solo exhibition by Berlin born artist Dennis Rudolph. Primarily working in painting and drawing, along with early forms of printmaking, Rudolph is highly formalistic and referential in his execution. His subject matter ranges from meticulous portraits to engaging apocalyptic arrangements of iconography and architecture. The artist examines and reinterprets historical events that influence the underlying narratives permeating his works.
The exhibition will focus on a group of paintings sourced from old photographs of soldiers from World War II. Always rendered from the shoulders up, the faces and expressions are the focal point, yet the portraits are decidedly not representations meant to depict power or triumph. The images show a cold romanticism, an almost formalistic view of men from a different and past time. The series of paintings forms a suite of ancestral portraits that raise the question of how one can refer to the past and its most violent events. As a German artist who was born 34 years after the end of the Second World War, Rudolph works through the shadows and remains of this international crisis whose aftershocks are unremitting and inescapable. Rudolph deals with history, its mythologization and writing, contributing to an epilogue of the vast divide brought on by the war.
Media
Schedule
from April 12, 2008 to March 17, 2008