The recent landscape show by Gottfried Helnwein at the Crawford Gallery in Cork contained a homage to Friedrich’s The Wreck of the Hope, while the current Walker & Walker exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy features a three-dimensional recreation of his work Wanderer in the Mist. Because it is a show culled from the extensive collection of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, A German Dream does not include these two key works, both of which are in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, but the six works that are included still offer a tantalising taster. They point the way to understanding Friedrich’s iconic idealism and energy, but what they highlight even more pointedly is the need for a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work. ...

If you fondly recall the Gottfried Helnwein self-portrait used as the cover of a Scorpions album, then you'll likely enjoy the Disney-dropping message of the artist's mixed media work American Prayer, and you'll probably even forgive the misspelling of his name on the nearby title card. After all, what evocation of comic-book history would be complete without a typo or two, and who's got time to read text, anyway, when there are such vibrantly graphic treasures as Michael Ray Charles' painting (Forever Free) Beware and the Reed Anderson/Daniel Davidson video "Macho Shogun" to enjoy looking at? ...

Homsest hakkab kinos “Sõprus” jooksma noore režissööri Anri Rulkovi autoriprogramm, kus linastuvad kaks tema lühifilmi – kolm aastat tagasi esilinastunud sünge ja salapärane “Helmut” ja tänavu valminud psühholoogiline thriller “Hirm”.

Kes su mõjutajad ja kõige suuremad eeskujud on?
Foto-, maali- ja installatsioonikunstnik Gottfried Helnwein. ...

Опубликовано 9 февраля'04
Gottfried Helnwein 'American Prayer', 2000
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Речь идет о том, что сейчас в России фактически происходит нивелирование возрастных позиций: различные возрастные группы по многим вопросам имеют сходное мнение. Например, как рассказала представитель компании Romir Monitoring Евгения Крикина, ценностные установки в отношении власти молодого и зрелого поколений практически сравнялись. Причем это можно расценивать как положительное явление. «Это очень хорошо, ведь, чтобы создать свое собственное мнение, человеку нужно иметь базу для него, — прокомментировала она. Бояться такого явления не стоит. Доверие к близким важно. Например, в начале 90-х постоянно возникали семейные конфликты, а сейчас это прошло: все смотрят одни и те же передачи, ходят в одни и те же магазины, и уровень конфликтов в семьях стал ниже». ...

"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. ...

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." ...

News: Ihr letztes Video "sAINT" wurde in den USA verboten. Warum?
Manson: Weil ich keine künstlerischen Kompromisse eingehen wollte und daher das dunkelste, intimste und furchtloseste Video meiner Laufbahn kreiert habe. ich habe sogar selbst die Kosten dafür getragen, um unabhängig zu bleiben.
Das Video hat mich an den Rand eines Nervenzusammenbruchs gebracht.
NEWS: Wie haben Sie sich davon wieder erholt?
Manson: Mein Mentor in allen künstlerischen Belangen, der österreichische Künstler Gottfried Helnwein hat mich daran erinnert, dass die einzige Medizin dagegen Kreativität ist, die aus dem Herzen kommt.
Als ich wieder zu arbeiten begann, war ich geheilt. ...

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. ...

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). ...

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. ...

...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. ... ...

Er begeistert Kalifornien:
Tausende strömen in die Ausstellung des Österreichischen Malers Gottfried Helnwein im Fine Arts Museum San Francisco.
Helnweins Schaffen wird überall leidenschaftlich diskutiert. Viele bewundern seine aggressiven Bilder, manche sind empört, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hat ihm erst kürzlich einen Sitz im Kunst-Beirat des Bundesstaates Kalifornien angeboten. ...

Visitors to Gottfried Helnwein's show of panoramic landscapes at the Crawford Municipial Gallery in Cork are having trouble deceiding either they are looking at paintings or photographs. Some are up to seven metres in length, by two metres wide:
a breathtaking, epic scale. They are extraordinarily beautiful, by any standards, and, yes, they are paintings.
The finish may be photorealist, but these are not direct transcriptions of what the camera lens sees; they are edited and informed by the artist's eye.
Take a close look at Irish Landscape III (Nire Valley) or Irish Landscape IV (County Waterford). Nor do they represent what the naked eye can see. American Landscape (Death Valley) is so wide that it has an almost vertiginous effect.
Dawn Williams who curated this show has done a superb job. ...

Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. His work is hauntingly gorgeous and suffused with pathos, precisely because viewers are immediately aware of the larger threat that looms within the pieces: the rupture of innocence. ...

Die Maschine, die immerfort höchste Qualität produziert, kann nicht still stehen.
Gottfried Helnwein, 56, arbeitet auch im Sommer wie ein Besessener. Der Österreichische Maler, einer der spärlichen heimischen Weltstars seiner Profession, eröffnet soeben im "Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco" seine erste amerikanische Einzelausstellung.
Verstörte, verwundete, misshandelte Kinder: das Thema lässt ihn seit den österreichischen Anfängen in den siebziger Jahren nicht los. Seit fünf Jahren bereitet er eine Retrospektive im Nationalmuseum von Peking vor, im Mai zeichnete er für die Ausstattung des Oratoriums "Das Paradies und die Peri" beim Schumannfest in Düsseldorf verantwortlich.
Und derzeit arbeitet er am Bühnenbild für den "Rosenkavalier", den Maximilian Schell an Placido Domingos Opernhaus von Los Angeles inszeniert. ...

...

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. ...