Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to present 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.

All in shades of black and white, rich in tone not unlike a daguerrotype, Rudolph’s portraits are executed in oil on board, recalling the tradition of Russian icon paintings—works that traditionally embody appearances of the sacred. The power of the subject is elevated through the purity of the painting. Rudolph does not create an homage to the anti-hero; the soldiers are likened neither to gods nor monsters;, but rather their impact lies in their appearance in time and space as images of a past that has already happened and that does not cease to continue to happen through images, memories, and traces. Rudolph shows the men and events which surround them, permanently etched or burned in the pages of history, as everpresent and continuous, acknowledging something on a radical, emotional level that most criticizers of such imagery might not acknowledge: that we are lost in a time of “after”, constantly struggling to restore a culture. There is a radical, apocalyptic break and it has already happened. Rudolph’s works do not show any melancholy about this rupture, they simply state it and make clear that there is no way back but that the question of the continuation in the “moment after” is still unanswered.

A large-scale print in three interlocking panels shows this perspective on a seemingly endless fantastic cityscape, an imagination of a space where numerous references from architecture, art history, literature and philosophy come together in one image. The complicated relationship between the real and imagined is interlaced visually and conceptually through Rudolph’s distinct voice. The etching, along with the sequence of paintings, creates a contemporary mysticism based on collective lost ideals and constructed visions. A site-specific light installation stresses the impression to be not only in a room of devotion but in a room where past and future are entwined, immersed in a dialogue.