Rudolf Debruin

Is my purpose as an artist for my work to be appreciated for its beauty or emotional power? Something beyond just shooting a beautiful image?
Maybe so, but my primary drive is to create, a drive that became stronger with age. One day I found a dead bird, wet, with ruffled feathers against a curb on a road near Amsterdam. I don’t know how it died, but its harrowing fate struck me. Twice the Fall that humanity befell. Driven from their celestial paradise in the sky and ending up in dirt, rain and spilled gasoline. I picked it up, took it home and made pictures of it, a process that later became the ‘Mortuus Avium’© series. Creating the images is a painful and sometimes begrimed process, since the subjects are dead and decaying. An inevitable fate I try to halt, albeit temporarily, by giving them a new and eternal life in my artworks.
The dark artworks by Anselm Kiefer and the Dutch artist Armando always inspired me. My iconography however, is more rooted in the 16th century Dutch masters tradition.

As an equipoise I needed to create artworks depicting life, exuberance and hope. Thus the ‘Vagina Monochromes’© came to life. Death and decay versus life and creation. The end versus the beginning. Thanatos versus Eros.

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High School
College (bachelor)

1987 Cafe Podium Arnhem
2019 Gem Kingdom Pop-Up store
2019 Sloan’s (Contemporary Art Gallery)