Upstream Focus: Dennis Rudolph

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Upstream Gallery presents Upstream Focus, a series of single work exhibitions in our private viewing space. Every week we will highlight the work of one artist, both online as well as offline. 

The sixth Upstream Focus is Dennis Rudolph’s Artificial_ Gods_Europe4. 

Within his most recent work, the Berlin based multimedia artist combines a focus on painting with virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR). This line of work deals with an ideology of failed utopian vision and apocalypse in global history, while drawing a relationship with our contemporary image culture.

Rudolph began using the virtual reality software Google TiltBrush as a medium in 2017 as he was fascinated by the immateriality of the process. The resulting artwork is present and absent at the same time. The medium also allows Rudolph to paint three dimensionally, allowing for movement and special effects to, int turn, feedback to the oil paintings we see at first glance. Refreshingly, painting in virtual reality has changed the way Rudolph paints ‘in real life’, creating an exchange between reality and virtual reality.

Read more here.