"Wenn wir von Helnwein sagen, er habe von aussen nach innen gemalt, dann heisst das,daß seine minutiöse und bohrend-insistierende Arbeitsweise, die die geschaute Wirklichkeit brutal interpretiert, eine hinter den Dingen im Verborgenen liegende Welt aufzudecken versucht.
Aus seinem Krisenbewusstsein, aus seiner Skepsis, aus der Qual des Beunruhigtseins, erwachsen Helnwein grauenerregende Bilder, sie geraten zum Peitschenhieb gegen einen aufgesetzten Positivismus, als dessen Treibfeder Profitdenken und Materialismus unserer hochgezüchteten Wirtschaftsgesellschaft verantwortlich zeichnen.
Aus einem intellektuellen Unbehagen gegenüber einem falsch verstandenen Fortschrittsglauben wählt der Künstler die Individualisierung, die sich dem weitgehend Unbekannten der Seele zuwendet. Helnweins Trauma einer kollektivistischen Gefährdung des Einzelmenschen lässt keine neutral wiedergebbahre Bilderwelt zu. Das gewohnte Erscheinungsbild des Menschen schlägt bei ihm um in ein Spiegelbild, das sich als Spaltbild, als eine Existenzstufe schmerzvoller Zerrissenheit des Kreatürlichen entlarvt. So erweist sich die geglaubte Wirklichkeit lediglich als Teilwahrheit."

"Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes are unashamedly aesthetic: gorgeous confections of pure, delicious spectacle. The typically epic but not inhuman scale imitates the subject matter. The tonal realism will make people go "Wow, are they paintings?" - thanks to the photorealist finish which seems free of the foibles of the human hand. Helnwein works with very small brushes - highlighting and subtly magnifying here, muting colours or creating shadows there; pushing some paintings towards momentary sleights of impressionism; and others towards seamless, burnished hyperreality.
The bird's eye view suggests a kind of superhuman vision which can simultaneously take in the entire view with breath-taking clarity, like some bionic eagle."

"...These photo-paintings appear even more real than a photograph: they are hyper-real, super-saturated depictions of the world that surrounds us, as we would like to see it. Helnwein’s landscapes offer us the world as we see it in our mind’s eye, our memories.
What is certain is that with these works Helnwein has raised the bar for artists to come with art that is groundbreaking in terms of scale, skill and vision. Painted mountains, fields and sky can never be the same again."

"Helnwein is the most important living painter."

"Andy Warhol sieht furchtbar aus. Blaß, übernächtigt und jedenfalls nicht in Bestform. William S. Burroughs posiert pikanterweise mit einem Revolver, und Michael Jacksons Gesicht erscheint als das, was es ist: perfekte Fassade. Kaum eines der von Gottfried Helnwein aufgenommenen Schwarzweißfotos berühmter Persönlichkeiten - von Lou Reed über die beiden wunderbaren Aufnahmen des alten Charles Bukowski bis zur schon beinahe aufdringlich nett in die Kamera blickenden Leni Riefenstahl - möchte man im Ernst als schmeichelhaft bezeichnen. Gerade das aber ist es, was seine in den achtziger Jahren begonnene Porträtserie "Faces" auszeichnet: Helnweins Bilder erzählen vermutlich mehr von den Menschen, als ihnen lieb ist."

"The new wave of rock-video grotesquerie isn't new at all, actually, the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, whose self-portrait adorned the cover of an album by the German band Scorpions some years back, was doing images of medical horror twenty years ago."

"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)."

"But what does the hyper-realism of Austrian-born, Irish-based artist Gottfried Helnwein say to us and about us in the context (of the exhibition) "Body Anxious"? His work is what puts this show on the map of bodily pain and anxiety. He has painted a hyper-realistic, oversized portrait of a little girl in a pink-and-white undershirt, her head and eyes swathed in gauze so recently wrapped that it glistens with blood. It is from Helnwein's "Los Caprichos" series, named after the famous Goya series. Art historians say Goya's "Caprichos" mark the beginning of the modern world of art because they were the first to look at, rather than avoid or symbolize, pain, fantasy, cruelty, disloyalty and any other number of grievous human traits."

"There was an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art including Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's Mickey. An entire wall was covered by the photographic black and white oil painting. The scale of this Mouse was enough to attract attention, but more than just its scale made it gripping. Mickey Mouse loomed over the viewer; this was not a friendly Mouse, nor a copy of the static corporate logo. This Mouse showed his teeth.
The facade of Disney and America in the guise of the Mouse is one of the things that Helnwein and others present to us. Claes Oldenburg took the facade to its literal extreme when he proposed a flat Mouse's image for a facade to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and produced a flat Mouse sculpture. Helnwein, Oldenburg and others are using the Mouse to make social and cultural comments about our society, in the broadest sense, but with humor."

"Wohl kein autoporträtatives Schaffen ist in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts derart mit einer expressiven Gesellschaftskritik, mit einer Anklage verbunden, wie das von Gottfried Helnwein. Der Künstler macht sich um einer schonungslosen Aussage willen zum schreienden, zum stellvertretend leidenden Objekt seiner Bilder: „Ich will mit meinen Bildern und Aktionen die Menschen aus ihrer Eingefrorenheit lösen, wenn auch nur eine Sekunde lang, will sie verunsichern und zu spontanen Reaktionen hinreißen. Verunsichern, aber nicht destruktiv. Die logische Denkfähigkeit soll zugunsten totaler Selbstöffnung kurz trocken gelegt werden“, stellte der österreichische Maler, Grafiker und Aktionskünstler Gottfried Helnwein zur Intention seines Werkes fest.
Helnweins Gemälde und Zeichnungen, die in der Tradition von Odilon Redon und Alfred Kubin stehen, zeigen mit hoher Suggestionskraft Szenarien von verletzten Menschen. Zunächst nur Kinder, dann auch Erwachsene in teils grotesken Posen, teils laut schreiend, teils in introvertierter Stille. Aber selbst wenn in ihnen nicht bildlich dargestellt geschrieen wird, so ist in den meisten Bildern ein stummer Aufschrei impliziert, der sich auf das ganze Werk überträgt"

"The Centre International d'Art Contemporain de Montreal chose a powerful show of black-and-white photos by the Viennese-born artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein's work is everything that Annie Leibovitz's, shown last spring at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is not. While both shoot celebrities - Helnwein's subjects include Keith Richards, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, William S.Burroughs, and an extremly wasted Andy Warhol - Helnwein's work is concentrated on the Psychological rather than on the gimmicky and the theatrical."

"Es ist der Mensch, ausschließlich der Mensch, das menschliche Antlitz, der vom Leben gezeichnete Mensch. Es geht Helnwein nicht um die schöne Oberfläche des Gesehenen, nicht um ästhetischen Genuß an der Natur und um eine Bestätigung herkömmlicher ästhetischer Normen.
Sein Blick geht tiefer, genauer, unter die Oberfläche, hinter die Fassade. Und was er sieht, ist das, was wir nicht sehen wollen, was wir verdrängen und ausklammern möchten."

"Gottfried Helnwein's wondrous staging of "Der Rosenkavalier" is eccentric and anachronistic — yet utterly faithful to its spirit.
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.
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. "

"What dominates, however, in a manner I've seldom seen is Helnwein's use of color -- the monochromatic blue of Act 1 even extends to skin color. Herr von Faninal's house is bathed in a rich golden sheen, from the orange glow of Ochs' silly wig to the platinum of the lovely Sophie's almost-there dress. The final act, in a cheap restaurant, is mainly a glaring red, again from Ochs' wig to his skin and the costumes of the huge band of players. The walls of the restaurant are, incidentally, lined with Helnwein's own works, mainly huge photo-realistic portraits of contemporary women. The 200 costumes Helnwein designed for the piece deserve a whole review for themselves this is inventiveness gone wild, a genius concept, and a huge addition to the production. There might be purists in disagreement here, but this would seem to be a "Rosenkavalier" for the ages."

"The Los Angeles Opera's much-anticipated new production of Strauss's "Rosenkavalier" opened on Sunday night and you can bet that the high-concept and boldly stylized sets and costumes by the designer and visual artist Gottfried Helnwein are going to provoke the strongest reactions.
Restraint was not a hallmark of the outlandishly captivating production. In a detailed program note, Helnwein writes that the era of Maria Theresa was a time when everything was theater, at least for the upper class, and that over-the-top fashion styles often included masks and white-face. His designs combine spartan sets with wildly extravagant costumes ranging in style from the surreal to the ridiculous. Act I is bathed in shades of blue. In their stiffly modern blue suits and blue-faced makeup, the Marschallin's notaries look like the members of Blue Man Group. In Act II, the mansion of Herr von Faninal, a wealthy commoner with aristocratic pretensions, glows with garish golden yellows. Faninal's servants could be creatures from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," no doubt an intentional evocation: the production begins with projected scenes from Robert Wiene's 1926 silent film adaptation of "Der Rosenkavalier," and Wiene also directed "Caligari." - In any event, the cast seemed empowered by the production."

"Helnwein's work is a complex dialectics of corporeality and ideality, accessibility and distance, fragility and invulnerability. In plastic form it is high optical sensitivity (portraits are drawn, yet their photographic basis remains perfectly clear), the forced magic of the fixed stare (the stare of the camera lens and tracking device - no wonder Susan Sontag identified tender homicide in the freeze-frame), heightened physical sensitivity, and coldly estranged form, behind which lie the universal phenomena of love and hate, presence and non-existence. ("There is a certain state of confusion in sensuality, like drowning. It's the nausea you feel when you see a dead body", writes George Bataille)."

"Menschlichkeit im Riesenmass (- über das monumentale Kinderbild im Werk Gottfried Helnweins, anlässlich einer Schenkung mehrerer Helnwein-Arbeiten an das Staatliche Russische Museum in St. Petersburg)"

"Many artists use photographs as references to create their paintings – and this is something that has already existed in the 19th century. Lehnbach painted the famous portraits of his contemporaries after photographs. Gerhard Richter and Gottfried Helnwein have given these photographic materials an additional accent – they have transformed them into paintings - not copied them."

"Gottfried Helnwein paints views of sadistic punishment with the care and precision of a latter-day Vermeer."

"Helnwein ist vor allem ein Fotokünstler. Er verstärkt das fotografische Abbild in dramatischen Ausdrücken. Es stimmt, bei ihm nehmen Häßlichkeit und Gewalt eine zentrale Rolle ein, aber nicht um ihrer selbst willen, sondern mit Gründen.
Ich achte seine Kunst."