Rising from Darkness is a book and an exhibition about resilience and resistance. About indomitable spirit and robustness in the face of dark prospects ahead. The term “resilience” is generally applied to the ability to find hope, light and strength to move on and build something even though the odds are stacked heavily against you. The works featured in the exhibition, and the article discussing those works in this publication, all speak of universally human traits and of hopeless situations that man has always encountered and sought to defy through the ages, individually or collectively. Here, however, the point of departure is more specific, rooted in a particular chapter of history: It is about a generation of Danish artists who, in the second half of the 1950s, created figurative graphic works of outstanding quality. With their keen eye for the historic challenges faced by Western man, they established a special standard for politically engaged, existentialist prints.