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DAS KUNSTWERK DER ZUKUNFT

Upstream Gallery

April 2023

As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.
- Richard Wagner, 1849

The title of this show finds its inspiration in the thesis of Richard Wagner’s essay - Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849): just as Mankind develops as the result of Nature’s conditions for the existence of Mankind - so too does Art develop as the result of the conditions mankind has set out for its manifestation.

Rudolph reflects on the current technological conditions set out by mankind for the existence and experience of art. As such, painting in VR - on the edge of presence and absence - is one of the core dichotomies of Rudolph’s work. The artist began using this medium as an exploration of the threshold between different realities, asking himself how one can create something that can be both present as well as absent at the same time. Painting in VR - and using AR to access these paintings - allows just that.

Once Rudolph paints something in VR with digital brush strokes, he looks for ways in which to give these digital brush strokes their materiality back, bringing them back to ‘our side’ of reality. The artist does this by painting details of the virtual works in a thick impasto technique with oil color, the physical results of which are at first glance abstract, but come alive as the AR-app recognizes the painting and the virtual painting appears at exactly the position where the artist painted the detail from. Only then do we, as the viewer, realize that the physical painting is part of a bigger digital whole.

The monumental painting Götterfries I (ATLAS Shrugged) forms the centerpiece of the exhibition. Using Rudolph’s AR-app, four figures from Greek mythology: Hermes, Europa, Atlas and Gaia (Rudolph’s Artificial Gods), appear out of the thick brush strokes on the screens of the visitor's phones. To the music composed by Dietrich Brüggemann the Gods perform a choreography. In his artwork Rudolph is appealing to all our senses and creating an immersive multi-sensory experience, combining oil paintings, augmented reality and music resulting in a Wagner-meets-Hollywood Gesamtkunstwerk.