Julian Rosefeldt

Julian Rosefeldt (b. 1965, Munich, Germany) is a German artist and filmmaker. Rosefeldt’s work consists primarily of elaborate, visually opulent film and video installations, often shown as panoramic multi-channel projections. His installations range in style from documentary to theatrical narrative. He lives and works in Berlin. He has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2011.

Julian Rosefeldt
Deep Gold, 2013/14
1-channel installation, black and white film, loop 18 min.

Gifted by LEAP Art Foundation – Jan Fischer to Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

The black-and-white film Deep Gold by Julian Rosefeldt is a homage to Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic L’Âge d’Or (1930). In his film, Buñuel confronted the values of the Catholic church and the mendacious bourgeois sexual morals of his time. Rosefeldt sets the action in a nightclub in 1920s Berlin, where various parallel worlds interact in its metropolitan setting.

Deep Gold functions as an additional insertion in Buñuel’s black-and-white film. It shows a world of desire and lust into which Modot, the protagonist in Buñuel’s film, is drawn and overwhelmed by the omnipresence of female sexuality. In this way, the film is an extension of what is already echoed in the Spanish surrealist’s relentless cinematic critique of society and religion: the challenge of repressive sexual morality, the dissolution of the given gender order, and the appeal to an emancipation that never excludes the power of female sexuality. Rosefeldt draws parallels between the economic situation of the 1920s and today. The cinematic leaps between times and spaces always say something about human sensitivities. Rosefeldt translates the longings of people, which have their fixed place in Hollywood cinemas, into reception-aesthetic categories of the visual arts.

Deep Gold has been part of the highly acclaimed collection presentation The Art of Society 1900–1945 and will be on view at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin until mid-2023.