Friday, October 8th, 2004
I went to the Gottfried Helnwein show at the Legion of Honor today for a class assignment. Really incredible show. His paintings are disturbing images of children in bandages, with scarification, or looking like their have experienced traumas that children their age should not have to live through. The paintings are photo realistic, similar to Gerhart Richter's paintings of newspaper clippings or portraits. They are pretty disturbing and as I looked around the room, I saw many people with hands over their faces. It's not an overt, in your face kind of disturbing, it's subtle. ...

"The Child," at the Legion of Honor (www.thinker.org), is a less lyrical experience that confronts the way that the world so glibly uses children (in advertising, in war, in religion) to achieve less-than-innocent objectives. Some of Helnwein's paintings are terrifying. Instead of poster-child perfection, we're presented with children with various deformities: wayward eyelids, lumpy defects, hideous extra folds of flesh.
Then there's Helnwein's penchant for contrasting childlike innocence with the horrors of the Third Reich. In one piece, a woman with a naked infant son, in the classic pose of the Madonna, basks in the soft-focus gaze of five men dressed in Nazi uniforms.
Thought-provoking? Very. Disturbing? You bet. Children are our sacred cows. But they grow up. In that way, they are miniature adults. Sometimes art can push us in ways that shake the status quo. ...

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Gottfried Helnwein’s first one-man exhibition at a major American museum is long overdue. 35 years in the making, “The Child” is a collection of more than fifty drawings, watercolors, photographs, and paintings (several monumental in size). It’s also a show that shocks, and among the crowds thronging to see it, some patrons will be put off: the day I attended, a few seemed downright uncomfortable, if not hostile, toward the work. This is fine. Art should shock, and provoke, and make us feel queasy sometimes.
“The Child” achieves all three, but also startles us with aching beauty, bedazzles us with painterly skill, and injects a necessary perspective into the culture’s collective conscience. ...

Marilyn Manson: "Gottfried Helnwein whom I collaborated with a lot invited us to get married at one of his castles in either Germany or Ireland," Manson said. "So we thought we would just have the pageantry and the ceremony of a normal wedding, but without the church. Because I don't think that I would really be welcome there." ...

:: Gottfried Helnwein :
»Andy Warhol, New York« [1983]
»Arnold Schwarzenegger, Los Angeles« [1984]
»William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, USA« [1990]
»Michael Jackson, Köln« [1988]
»Willy Brandt, Bonn« [1989]
»Keith Richards, Berlin« [1990] ...

J'en ai choisi une sans sang et sans cris, quand même. Mon humeur était à l'atrocité silencieuse, cette nuit. Je trouve ça pire, parce qu'on peut imaginer. Et quand on peut imaginer, j'imagine le pire. Celle-ci, je l'ai en petite carte postale dans un petit livre de reproductions sur cartes postales du même mec. On dirait un corps en décomposition avancée. L'enfance annihilée, mais oui. Comme c'est tragique, mes enfants. Regardez ce qui vous attend.
Helnwein. Si un jour il expose à Montréal, vous me le direz. ...

“There are three things that cannot be seen, even though they may be right in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and death“
Georges Bataille
The child
“A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything. “It’s important for certain artists to respond to what’s going on in present time.”
“Gottfried Helnwein is an artist whose work - “giant color portraits of stillborn babies, paintings that merge Nazi-archive photographs with pictures Helnwein has taken, enigmatic portrayals of apparently wounded or menaced children” - tends to provoke strong reactions, and in recent years, several individuals have expressed their displeasure with some of his images by defacing them” (Adding to the discussion artsjournal.com)
Innocence lost by Anita Amirrezvani 04. August 2004 The Mercury News
His new exhibit called “The Child,” through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco - Robert Flynn Johnson Curator in Charge : THE CHILD Works by Gottfried Helnwein ...

Thursday, September 09, 2004
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Modernism Inc.
(San Francisco, California, USA) 25th Anniversary Exhibition: Alexander Bogomazov, R. Crumb, James Hayward, Gottfried Helnwein, George Koskas, Naomie Kremer, Le Corbusier, Kazimir Malevich, Mel Ramos, John Register, David Simpson, Mark Stockand more. ...

Austrian-born and educated and now living Los Angeles, Helnwein employs a hyperrealist manner that will remind Americans of Gerhard Richter but, if anything, works to opposite effect. Rather than re-confirm post-modernist cynicism, Helnwein rekindles post-war anguish. This selection, going back more than three decades, emphasizes his preoccupation with the image of the child, from early Nitsch- and Schwarzkogler-influenced photo-actions (with the requisite bandages) to recent large portrait-like heads and depictions of Christ-child-like babes attracting odd, menacing crowds. A perverse streak runs through the images, but it’s not pederasty: tinged with surrealism, it’s an enduring shame and anger at the Nazi past – and the artist’s suspicion that Naziism hasn’t been eradicated. ...

This exhibition by internationally renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein continues in the Crawford Art Gallery until September 4 th next. Helnwein bases himself between Co. Tipperary and Los Angeles and is exhibiting a number of large scale photorealist canvases depicting landscape. Perhaps more recognized as a painter of highly emotive portraits, this exhibition will reveal the influence of landscape throughout his career from the early Vienna cityscapes to the present series of Irish landscapes and recognizes the impact which the German romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) has had on Helnwein’s work. Born in Vienna in 1948, he is a formidable artist and his work has often been seen as controversial because it functions as moral probes. ...

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Look at his inexplicably damaged children, often painted in a midnight monochrome, and you can't help but try to fill in the story, and take a degree of responsibility.
Helnwein's work is what the art world likes to call "difficult, "often as an excuse to look the other way. ...

Cover waren und sind mehr als lustige Verpackung. Sie sind Kunst.
Die Pop-Art Peter Blakes für "Sgt. Pepper" von den Beatles. Andy Warhols schlüpfrige Banane (Velvet Underground) oder der einladende Jeansstall (Rolling Stones). Cal Schenkel illustrierte (Zappa), Robert Crumb schraffierte (Joplin), Gottfried Helnwein schockte (Rammstein), Malcolm McLaren dilettierte (Sex Pistols). ...

Yesterday morning I went over to the Legion of Honor to see the Gottfried Helnwein show, "The Child". After all the build-up and warnings about the darkness of his work, I was surprised at the beauty and humor I found there. There are some superficial similarities between Helnwein and Gerhard Richter, but while Richter is the better painter technically, Helnwein (more of a conceptual artist) has more heart. In both cases, they're telling us the world sucks. But Helnwein also sees the good, the beautiful, and the possibilities for redemption. ...

In the film "Ninth November Night," painter Gottfried Helnwein describes his first encounter with Jewish people during his childhood in Austria after the war, a bleak and dark period, one, he says, with no singing, no laughter. He was nine years old when he saw the two people walking down the street, very close together, walking quickly, looking down the whole time.
Helnwein became intrigued and wanted to know who they were. He asked everyone, all the adults, "Who are they?" But no one wanted to answer. Finally, someone said the word, one that he remembers the person had great difficulty saying - "Jews." ...

The film tells the story of famed Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, obsessed with a mission to use his art to preserve the memory of Holocaust persecutions. ...

[Aug. 16th, 2004|08:07 pm]
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For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, has assembled a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein’s works and provided an insightful essay on his art in this exhibition catalogue.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses. Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public.
The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society. ...