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Helnwein's preoccupation with the dark side of modern history, including its abuse of images, has never left him. He did a whole series of paintings (the Legion show includes a couple) so dark as to appear imageless. But he intended them not as mirrors of dark times but as counterthrusts to the aggressive reach of so much contemporary culture.
Despite the grotesquerie it contains, the Legion show also has elements of pathos.

Helnwein nodded yes when asked whether he has made a theme of innocence. "It's a dangerous word, it's so abused and misused, but yes that's probably the basic essence of what I'm interested in."
"As soon as somebody's grown up they have so many issues," he said. "When you look at a person -- what social level, what country they're from, what fashion they affect -- all this stuff comes in, but I'm interested in the stage of a human being where it's not so important whether it's a male or female, before we can tell any social background or anything, it's just ... abstract, almost."
...Probably few visitors will appreciate the detachment in Helnwein's work. They will more likely respond to his concern with the power of images. We willingly subject ourselves to their power every day without really understanding it. If nothing else, his pictures, no matter how confrontational, stand still and permit us, even defy us, to understand how they work upon us. ...

An artist with conscience, a fearless man with a penchant for profoundly bizarre and complex, meaningful images, Gottfried Helnwein is making a grand re-entry to San Francisco. His work was exhibited here four years ago when his freaky mixed-media portrait of Mickey Mouse - "Mouse I" - was part of the SF Museum of Modern Art's "The Darker Side of Playland - Childhood Imagery."
The paintings are extraordinary, grotesque, powerful, "difficult" and challenging, according to Parker and the curator of the Legion exhibit, Robert Flynn Johnson.
They are all that, and more. A simple description of the works, without context, would only indicate a freak show: a photo-like painting of Hitler with two very Aryan-looking children, an actual bar of soap encased under them; a group of uniformed Nazis gazing adoringly on a contemporary Mother and Child (Helnwein explaining that the people in the photograph that was the basis for the painting were actually surrounding Hitler); images of normal children mixed with misshapen, ill, tortured youngsters. "Why would people cause so much pain to others?" Helnwein asks, and he shows the pain, unflinchingly, but not to titillate the demented or to horrify the ignorant.
"The Child" - located in a part of the Legion next to a permanent exhibit of Renaissance Mother and Child images by Pontormo, Tintoretto, Raphael, and others - has far more to offer than politics, morality, controversy and horror. Although there is no doubt that primarily Helnwein is "the artist as provocateur," he is also an artist in the sense of creating unique and lasting images. ...

A new exhibit called "The Child," through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, presents images of distressed, wounded or threatened children, a topic that has fascinated Helnwein for years.
Many of the children depicted in the show have deformities, bandages, scars or wounds; some appear threatened by menacing adults or by mayhem. Their suffering, indeed wrenching to witness, inevitably becomes a statement about the human condition.
A 55-year-old father of four, Helnwein sees himself as an artist with a message. "A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything," he said. "It's important for certain artists to respond to what's going on in present time."
Curator Robert Flynn Johnson believes it is appropriate to display art with a moral message. "Museums shouldn't be like Rip Van Winkle, in a state of catatonic sleep," he says. "They should take on issues. Otherwise they will be seen just as a low-grade entertainment vehicle. We're not out to shock -- we're out to make people think."
Johnson places Helnwein in the tradition of such contemporary activist artists as filmmakers Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11") and Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"), painter Gerhard Richter and painter Sue Coe, whose "deadmeat prints" include images of animal slaughter.
Museum officials have posted notices in the museum lobby and outside the gallery to warn people that viewer discretion is advised.

Officials at the Legion hope the exhibit will reach an audience that more typically comes to blockbuster shows on classical Egypt or the Old Masters. "If I do a show like this one that upsets the docents,"Johnson says, "I know that I've got a good show." ...

..A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it included self-portraits, is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within.
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"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot, which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."
Jean Cocteau ...

Für das 8.Internationale Schumann-Fest in Düsseldorf brachte man nun ein kongeniales Team zusammen, um eine komplette szenische Umsetzung in der altehrwürdigen Tonhalle zu realisieren.
Gregor Seyffert – mit Preisen geradezu überschüttete Tanzikone – hat zusammen mit Gottfried Helnwein – international geachteter Künstler und Bühnenbildner – ein im wesentlichen tänzerisches, hochintelligentes Konzept entworfen, welches alle Mittel moderner, multimedialer Bühnengestaltung beinhaltet; dem Besucher gehen förmlich die Augen über. Vor lauter medialer Aktivität könnte man fast die traumhaft schöne Musik und den Gesang vergessen.
Frenetischer, nicht enden-wollender Beifall, eines begeisterten Düsseldorfer Publikums, für einen Abend, den keiner so schnell vergessen wird. Lebendigstes Musiktheater, welches der sich zur Zeit im Tiefschlaf befindenden Deutschen Oper am Rhein nicht nur konkurrenzlos den Ruhm abgräbt, sondern zeigt, daß Düsseldorf durchaus Weltklasse bieten kann. Warum nicht öfter ? ...

Director, Choreographer: Gregor Seyffert & Compagnie Berlin
Conductor: John Fiore
Sopran: Jörg Waschinski
Düsseldorfer Symphoniker
Chor des Städtischen Musikvereins Düsseldorf ...

An urban oasis — The California Palace of the Legion of Honor is San Francisco's most seductively situated museum
From July 31-Nov. 28, the museum will present paintings, drawings and photographs by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. The exhibit, titled "The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein," looks at children as innocent, yet exploited. ...

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, die derzeit im Neuen Kunstverein Aschaffenburg zu sehen sind, erzählen vermutlich mehr von den Menschen, als ihnen lieb ist. ...

The Times:
"...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." ...