The Curse of the EMPIRE (Rise & Fall)

Upstream Gallery will present a new exhibition with paintings, etchings and drawings by the young German artist Dennis Rudolph.

In his work Dennis Rudolph (Berlin, 1979) shows us how he is trying to recover the German history of codes referring to German art-historic iconography or German heraldic symbols. He works with the longtime hidden iconography of german romantic and pathetic landscape like Caspar D. Friedrich or symbols like the eagle etc.. His portraits refer to Christian iconography like the holy Mary or to German soldiers (the young generation in Germany mostly knows their grandfathers just from old photographs of the 30ties because they died in World War II) or philosophers of the romantic era discussing the German identity in the context of the poly national state.

By mixing motives of landscape, Christian iconography, historic heraldic etc. Rudolph is building up a kind of an "art religion". Trying to formulate a new general German iconography for German society nowadays.
His hope is to find a new base for a German identity because this was a hidden thing concerning the former generations of Germans from the 60ties who absolutely negotiated these movements judging them with spokes like "nazi- attitude" etc.. The motivation of his generation to discuss the subject of recovering a German iconography for a new German identity is provoked by the trend of a nowadays more and more global society. Rudolph is a typical young German artist working on this subject and can be compared to other young German colleagues like Jonathan Meese, Thomas Zipp, Uwe Henneken etc.