HEY, there's Mickey Mouse at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art!
Wait a minute. That's not my perky little pal from ''Steamboat Willie.'' This Mickey looks a little mean. This Mickey looks like Michael Eisner's id. Nice Mickey. Don't hurt me. Here's a dollar.
That's how it goes at ''The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection,'' perhaps the first show to suggest that there are indeed monsters under the bed, and you might as well get used to it.
SFMOMA curatorial associate Heather Whitmore Jain struck the perfect note by opening the show with Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's massive and menacing oil and acrylic ''Mickey.''
It's hard to imagine another contemporary symbol so perfectly balanced between beloved childhood icon and its day job as a corporate logo. Helnwein chooses an earlier Mickey, with the smaller, darker eyes and the longer, more ratlike nose to help make his point. With his pasted-on smile and forward lunge, this Mickey looks more ready to negotiate cable and Web rights than to comfort a preschooler. ...

Kunstenaar Gottfried Helnwein daagt uit met zijn gemanipuleerde beelden van de werkelijkheid. Vooral politieke figuren, uit verleden en heden, zijn in zijn werk de klos. Heimat Oostenrijk heeft hij moeten ontvluchten. Bas Groes sprak hem: ‘Isolatie helpt niet, zonder dialoog verandert er niets. ...

Deutschbauer:
"Was sind am Schluss eines Buches für gewöhnlich Ihre Gedanken?"
Maler Gottfried Helnwein:
"Ich habe Bücher gern, die mich am Ende hängen, ratlos lassen.
Da fange ich dann an nachzudenken."
Gottfried Helnwein über "Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit" von Marcel Proust.

With ironic images of toys and cartoon figures, a number of contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors take incisive aim at the emotional underbelly of childhood in The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from September 1, 2000, through January 2, 2001. Explaining how these representations question deeply rooted social mores, this exhibition includes over 30 playful and wicked works-drawn from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan-by such contemporary artists as Gottfried Helnwein, David Levinthal, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Laurie Simmons and Hung Tung-lu. As Kent Logan states, "Of the themes in our collection this exhibition will explore what I like to call 'Children's Hour.'" ...

Austrian artist Gottfired Helnwein's powerful and haunting paintings provide a disturbing commentary on Nazism and the Holocaust, regularly provoking outraged reactions from right-wingers in his native land and in Germany. "I was amazed how much pictures could reach into the hearts and minds of people - and how much they would talk to me about it," he told the JC. "For me, art is like a dialogue. My art is not giving answers, it is asking questions." ...

Helnwein, the controversial Austrian artist whose works is currently on show at the Robert Sandelson gallery in London, has always been a difficult personality to pin down.
He chose to exhibit all three "Epiphany" paintings alongside a series of photographs of 19th century stillborn foetuses in an exhibition entitled "Apokalypse". Hung together in a Dominican church in Weinstadt in Austria, the final effect was one of haunting beauty, each child framed magnificently within the high vaulted ceiling of the church. The juxtaposition of these serene yet poignant images of "beings that never were" placed next to paintings that recalled the ideological terrors of the past, created a synthesis of values as politically dynamic as they were aesthetically entrancing. Yet throughout his career as an artist Helnwein has never ceased to use his work as a way to question his immediate surroundings. ...

Kleines Helnwein es la primera obra escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten, hasta el momento un joven asistente a talleres de dramaturgia y actuación. Su fuente de inspiración fue la obra del pintor austríaco Gottfried Helnwein, de quien vio una muestra en Europa, hace tres años. El artista plástico trabajó como escenógrafo en algunas puestas del dramaturgo y director Heiner Müller. El personaje central de su espectáculo surge en escena como escapado de una de las obras del artista para exponer “su distanciamiento ante el dolor y su intimidad, presa en una atmósfera infantil”. En el panel central de la escenografía son proyectados algunos cuadros de Helnwein.
...

“Kleines Helnwein”, escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten. Con Belén Blanco y Martin von Tumpling. Música: Mariano Durand y Marcelo Vignolo. En El Callejón de los Deseos, los viernes a las 21.30.
ADMIRABLE actuación de Belén Blanco en esta pieza fascinante.

Con su impecable dominio técnico, comparable con el de los maestros antiguos, el austríaco Gottfried Helnwein (52) puede ser un agudo pintor mundano y también un minucioso cronista del espanto desatado en el mundo por el afán de poder y la exasperación de la violencia. El joven director, autor y también actor Rodrigo Malmsten, formado, entre otros maestros, junto a Daniel Veronese y Alejandro Tantanián (“El periférico de objetos”), parte de la pintura de Helnwein para mostrar, en forma de drama, cómo esa violencia, impersonal y en cierto modo clínica, degrada al hombre hasta convertirlo en un objeto, en otra máquina de destrucción (y también, naturalmente, de autodestrucción). ...

A year or so back, an exhibition called Sensations caused a few upsets, first in London and then in New York. Central to the reaction was a large-scale portrait of a child-killer assembled from, if I remember correctly, the palm prints of children. So far, so bland. The shock element in art has been much talked about in the last five years but art that actually shocks has been thin on the ground during the same period.
Step forward then, Gottfried Helnwein.
By and large, if art is going to shock, it better have something shocking to say,and it's clear that Helnwein has found that. ...

A blonde Madonna, dressed as if she were spending an evening at the opera, presents her child to the watchful eyes of Nazi SS Guards, One officer looks as if he were studying the child's genitals, perhaps to see whether he has been circumcised. Dark hair parted severely to one side and fleshy baby cheeks lending a slight and comical hangdog expression, the young child presents something of an eerie resemblance to the Führer. ...