Die Zurschaustellung des eigenen Körpers als Verwesungsmasse beginnt mit den Selbstporträts von George Grosz als Suizidgestalt im Kaffeehaus und reicht über die wie durch den Fleischwolf gedrehten Konterfeis eines Francis Bacon bis hin zur Leichenfledderei am eigenen Leib bei Günter Brus, Kurt Kren oder Frank Tovey, dem jüngst verstorbenen Enfant terrible der experimentellen New-Wave-Szene der 1980er Jahre. Die Befreiung des melancholischen Bewusstseins durch den Tod bietet keine philosophische Perspektive mehr. Es ist ihm ohnedies schon anheim gefallen. Stattdessen wird der Suizid in einer Performance masochistischer Selbstverstümmelung kultisch sublimiert.
In einer fotografischen Inszenierung Gottfried Helnweins erhebt sich der Künstler, fäulnisschwarz und monumental wie das Mahnmal einer letzen Einsicht: “So ist Verzweiflung, diese Krankheit im Selbst, die Krankheit zum Tode. Der verzweifelte ist todkrank. Der Tod ist nicht das letzte der Krankheit, aber der Tod ist in einem fort das Letzte. Von dieser Krankheit erlöst zu werden durch den Tod ist eine Unmöglichkeit, denn die Krankheit und deren Qual und der Tod ist gerade, nicht sterben zu können.”
So ist die Geschichte der Moderne nicht zuletzt auch eine Erfolgsgeschichte der Melancholie und des Eindringens ihres schwarzen Spuks in die letzten Paradiese des Seins- und Weltvertrauens. ...

The thing you should know about this "Rosenkavalier" is that it is terrific. Richard Strauss' opera sounds great and looks sensational. It is excellently sung, sumptuously conducted by Kent Nagano and, thanks to Gottfried Helnwein, wondrously strange.
Helnwein — the Austrian artist (painter, photographer, performance artist, filmmaker) who has a studio in downtown L.A. — is known for everything from Marilyn Manson videos to Holocaust installations. He is responsible for the sets, costumes and that ad (which, by the way, looks like an image from a recent staging of a Schumann oratorio that Helnwein designed in Düsseldorf).
Helnwein's vision of "Rosenkavalier" is monochromatic and a riot of color. It is oddly traditional yet seriously odd. It is updated but couldn't be more 18th century. And none of those opposites contradicts. ...

Gottfried Helnwein's Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi) is a strange takeoff on a traditional New Testament theme in art. The work depicts a Madonnalike mother displaying her baby to attentive Nazi officers, Painted in hyperrealist grisaille with chiaroscuro effects, the work resembles an old documentary photograph made huge. The eerie, sinister overtones are unmistakable. Who is this mother? What do these officers want with her and her child? What kind of official paper might the officer on the left hold in his hand and what might be its result? Helnwein, characteristically, presents us with an ambiguous, haunting image and leaves us to wonder about its meaning. Helnwein's background perhaps helps explain why his often difficult subjects have been interpreted in various, often contradictory, ways by opposing sides of the political debate about World War II. With its huge size, hyperrealist style, and disturbing content, this unsettling work bestows a psychological anxiety accompanied by a strong magnetic pull. Confronting it, we tend to stare-entranced by both its beauty and its seductive, malevolent overtones. ...

Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. Like Wong from Asia and Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation.
The child’s face – painted in a realistic style yet eerily unreal – may allude to the uncertain (in limbo-like) quality of Helnwein’s own childhood. Helnwein is among a network of contemporary artists expressing visions that embrace and also transcend cultural nomenclature. ...

Ever since I clicked on it, Gottfried Helnwein’s "American Prayer" (2000) has taken up residency in my mind.
I began to discover a semiotic richness in this painting worthy of what W.J.T. Mitchell has called a "metapicture" - a "picture that [is] used to show what a picture is". Mitchell situates the concept of metapicture in "'iconology', the study of the general field of images and their relation to discourse," thereby cutting across Greenbergian self-reflexivity into an expanded context that includes popular culture as well as contemporary art. In this wider cultural field, a metapicture does more than reflect on the nature of the picture itself and calls into question "the self-understanding of the observer". I will argue that "American Prayer" derives its theoretical relevance partly from its concealed hybridity, from the interplay between technological media and painting. In this work, the substitution of one medium by another reinforces the meaning that can be created from the iconographic substitution of the child by Pinocchio, and the replacement of the deity by Donald. In the end, Donald’s sideways glance at us indicates that this picture is really about us, the observers; it questions our own place in a cultural web of illusionism spun from the abiding human desire to overcome death. ...

...

Eins zeigt ein Mädchen mit frechem Gesicht und Blindenband um den Arm, das die Zunge herausstreckt. Erst habe ich gelächelt. Wer den Blick länger verharren lässt, sieht, dass dem Mädchen Blut zwischen den Beinen herunterläuft. Es wurde ganz offensichtlich missbraucht, ihm wurde Gewalt angetan.... Ja, Kinder sind verletzbar. Kindheit kann grausam sein, wenn Kinder ausgeliefert sind. Ich denke an sexuellen Missbrauch, eine unglaublich Form von Folter an Menschen, die lebenslang an dem Trauma leiden werden. Ich denke an Kindersoldaten in Togo, im Kongo, im Sudan. Zerstörte Leben, brutal geopfert für idiotische Machtkämpfe, in denen Zerstörung das oberste Gebot ist, in denen es keine Ziele mehr gibt. Ich denke an Kinder in Indien, die schuften schon mit fünf Jahren um ein paar Münzen zu verdienen, damit ihre Familie überleben kann. Ich denke an die 12-jährigen Judith Wischnajatskaja, die im Juli 1942 in ihrem letzten Brief schrieb: “Lieber Vater! Vor dem Tod nehme ich Abschied von Dir. Wir möchten so gerne leben, doch man lässt uns nicht, wir werden umkommen. Ich habe solche Angst vor diesem Tod, denn die kleinen Kinder werden lebendig in die Grube geworfen.“ ...

Toda la obra de Helnwein presenta originalidad. Esta es una de las características que hacen que lo podamos definir como verdadero artista; no sólo porque se ha podido apoderar de la técnica a tal punto que pareciera que le pertenece, sino porque además se ha propuesto descubrir y experimentar con distintos soportes y técnicas nuevas. En cada pieza podemos ver la reflexión que plantea sobre lo humano visto por medio del dolor y el sufrimiento; intentando hablar por medio de lo visual lo que los escritores y filósofos plantearon sobre lo utópica que es la sociedad; desmitifica los valores religiosos y cuestiona la moral. ...

Gottfried Helnwein's classic yet unnerving images transform sentimental representations of childhood into portraits of individual subjects frozen at the moment of suffering. His photo-paintings pirouette on the fine line between chocolate box pictures/excessive sentimentality and the cost to children of being treated as commodities, of suffering emotional or physical pain at a grown-up's hands.
High pictorial and technical values create compositions that recall contemporary cinema and seventeenth-century painting, expanding the treatment of time into epic. This apparent grandiosity plays against the immediacy of each suffering subject, underlining the different experience of time in childhood. Small hurts can devastate when you're a child. Big hurts stay with you for years, as survivors of Hitler's Anschluss testify.
Now, in the age of virtual use and abuse of children, Helnwein's insistence on valuing the humanity and charm of the littlest, the least powerful, offers a counterpoint to claims that suffering counts most when you're grown-up. It opens his practice into a series of pictorial mise-en-scènes, as did Rembrandt's tableaux in The Blinding of Samson (1636) or The Night Watch (1642). ...

“All a poet can do today is warn”, World War 1 soldier poet, Wilfred Owen, wrote in a draft Preface for a book of anti-war poems he would never see published. He was killed on the eve of Armistice Day 1918. World War One, The Great War, The War to End All Wars . . . within twenty summers, Europe was engulfed again in the even greater catastrophies of the fascist era. The work of Gottfried Helnwein has its genesis in these years. They obsess him as a creative artist. As a kind of guardian angel, he grapples with them on our behalf. That such a nightmare would never visit us again. Or our children. Or our children’s children. Or “. . .all those still to come”. ...

Nereflektovaná minulost, jež nepřetržitě prorůstá do současnosti a způsobuje úzkost, je Helnweinovým hlavním tématem. Expozice jeho hyperrealistické, za fotografii lehko zaměnitelné malby i fotografií pokračuje v dramaturgické psychologizující linii výstav Galerie Rudolfinum. Gottfried HelnweinHelnweinova tvorba má i silný politický přesah. Malíř se počátkem 70. let zařadil mezi vídeňské akcionisty, kteří kritizovali rakouskou kolektivní amnézii ve vztahu k fašistické minulosti země. Hnutí nezávislých politicky angažovaných umělců se snažila státní moc potlačit, revoltující akcionisty třeba na čas uvěznila či v krajním případě vyhnala do exilu. Při performancích akcionistů tenkrát třeba tekla krev a po zemi se válely vnitřnosti. Dnes je vídeňský akcionismus nejznámějším ryze rakouským avantgardním uměleckým směrem. ...

El nuevo arte del dolor, con esta pretensión provoca una serie de experiencias catárticas que permiten hacer una traducción personal de lo que quiere decir, porque a partir de esta provoca en el espectador una sensación que muchas veces es identificada por cualquier hombre que contemple sus obras.
Una simple manifestación artística que permite hacer de una sola imagen algo que sea comprendido por la mayoría. El llanto de un niño es un símbolo universal en el que su comprensión no necesita de idiomas, ni idiosincrasias, es por eso que el arte de Helnwein legitima esta experiencia, porque de entrada el centrarse en el ser humano mantiene una sola lectura; la del ser humano; cualquier dolor y sensación es conocida sin tenerla que haberla vivido. La obra de este artista mantiene siempre la intención de provocar miedos, deseos, dolor y felicidad con la intención de nunca revelar respuestas, sino que siempre formulará preguntas que hagan al ser humano detenerse y observar para entender: ¿Cómo hemos llegado a esto? ¿Por qué lo seguimos permitiendo? ...

La manière la plus dialectique pour recycler, détourner, admirer et critiquer tout à la fois, demeure le médium photographique. Gottfried Helnwein propose des images inconvenantes, qui renvoient la pérennité des objets dérivés de Disney à des statuts diversement fétichistes: images saintes que l'on prie ou statuettes lubriques qui promettent des extases ambiguës. ...

21c Museum is North America's first museum dedicated solely to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art of the 21st century and will host a series of guest curators. The 21c collection features both emerging artists and acclaimed international artists, such as video artists Bill Viola and Tony Oursler, photographers, Andres Serrano, Sam Taylor Wood, and David Leventhal, sculptors Yinka Shonibare and Judy Fox, and multimedia artists Chuck Close, Gottfried Helnwein, Red Grooms and Kara Walker. ...

"She is not as old as she seems, though age, at least in her case, is an elusive notion. In fact, it is her childhood that is fixated, and not out of nostalgia. True, it would take a daring leap of imagination to connect pudgy little hands to the body as it is now, or to visualize the dimples and the baby teeth. The little-girl-who-once-was thought: Maybe I am really dead. Because only dead people get pushed so deep down".
(From: And the Rat Laughed, by Nava Semel).
Helnwein is a great believer in the ability of art to pass emotional memory on, as a reminder of the past or mainly as a warning of what the future might hold, for humanity, as far as he is concerned, has not learnt its lesson. Is there atonement in his artistic endeavors? I prefer the Jewish concept of - tikkun, purification of the soul. It has a deeper meaning than the physical healing of scars, for it elevates us to the highest sphere of the spirit. The wounded girls close their eyes, but they are not blind. Behind their closed lids their gaze is clear and penetrating. ...

Continuando la perspectiva del ritual, Günter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Yoko Ono, Saburó Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Gottfried Helnwein, Ushio Shinohara, Peter Wiebel, Otto Muehl, Stelarc (en su etapa inicial de Suspension), entre otros, proponen la exposición de un hecho que sucede en tiempo real y que supera la noción de ficcionalidad o emulación. ...

A virtuoso and a visionary with one eye behind the veil of the world, the other reflecting endless horror, beauty, loss, humour and melancholy - all with a steady hand. The position is supreme, the means are penetrating and the message as deep as it gets. To me the strange silent directness in Helnweins work is unrivaled, no other artist today tells the dim story of the world in a more disturbing and moving way. His work, views and perspectives are completely congruent and appeals to me in a very direct and personal way. ...

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents the exhibition Austrian Contemporary Art and Post-war Painting: The Essl Collection, a seminal encounter with the most commanding pictorial propositions engendered in the second half of the 2Oth century.
Gottfried Helnwein digresses from fleeting contemplation with his Self-portrait: the canvas on display prompts an immediate, impulsive reaction... ...

"La función del artista es evocar la experiencia del reconocimiento sorpresivo: mostrarle al espectador lo que él sabe pero no sabe que sabe. Y Helnwein es un maestro del reconocimiento sorpresivo."
William Burroughs
Sus primeros trabajos consistían principalmente de acuarelas hiperrealistas de niños heridos, asi como performances - a menudo con niños - en lugares públicos. Helnwein es un Artista conceptual, interesado principalmente en la ansiedad psicológica y sociológica, asi como en temas históricos y políticos. Como resultado de ésto, su trabajo suele ser considerado provocativo y controversial. Helnwein ha trabajado como pintor, dibujante, muralista, fotógrafo, escultor y artista de performance, utilizando una gran variedad de técnicas y medios. ...

Mag in der Insistenz und Extensität der Produktion Rainers Werk herausragen, die Abwendung von der Anthropologie, die als Negation doch auch mit ihr verknüpft ist, durchzieht die Kunst seit der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zum Bestand der kanonisierten Kunst gehören mittlerweile die fotografisch dokumentierten Body-Perfomances der 60er und 70er Jahre (z.B. Bruce Naumann, Jürgen Klauke, Klaus Rinke), die Selbstporträts Gottfried Helnweins der 70er und 80er Jahre, die Video-Dummies von Tony Oursler. ...