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. ...

...

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." ...

Раммстейн гарячка [Sep. 22nd, 2004|11:24 am]
[ music | Devision - Aimee (Intricated Remix) ]
21 листопада Раммстейн дасть концерт в Пітері, це дало поштовх для Раммштейн гарячки в мене сьогодні ранком.
* Раммси поважають соняшники в оформленні так само як і я;
* Раммси звертали увагу на творчість Gottfried Helnwein , так само як і я ...

:: 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. ...