Dennis Rudolph
Dennis Rudolph (born 1979 in Berlin, Germany) is a conceptual 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. Biography. Rudolph lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Language and Cultural Institute in Beijing, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and the Berlin University of the Arts, where he graduated in 2004. Since 2004 his work has been on show in galleries in Europe and the US. Work. In his first body of work, featuring explicitly  traditional artistic media (such as oil painting, ink drawing and copperplate etching), Rudolph addressed German National Socialism with regard to its belated appropriation of the pre-modern entanglement of art and cult. „Deutsche Ahnengalerie“ (2006-2008), for example, is a portrait series based on photographs of nameless World War II soldiers, found on Berlin flea markets. The idealized style of these antique-like panel paintings referred to the religious form of the icon. From 2012-2018, Rudolph had been involved with the project of updating Rodin's Gates to Hell. Conceptually "Das Portal" had to be on the threshold between  two realities (Heaven and Hell) and was to be placed in California City. Within the framework of this large-scale project, Rudolph was going through an artistic crisis as he couldn’t find the right medium to fulfill the idea of his concept. It had to be a medium that is present and absent at the same time. It was only the invention of consumer Virtual Reality Headsets that helped him overcome the crisis and complete the project. With a VR 3D painting software he painted "Das Portal" digitally "on the other side" and placed it by building a GPS  based Augmented Reality App for smart phones that projected the work on the Desert Butte in California City. Since then the Virtual Reality has dramatically changed his way of painting.