Gottfried Helnwein's Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi) is a strange takeoff on a traditional New Testament theme in art. The work depicts a Madonnalike mother displaying her baby to attentive Nazi officers, Painted in hyperrealist grisaille with chiaroscuro effects, the work resembles an old documentary photograph made huge. The eerie, sinister overtones are unmistakable. Who is this mother? What do these officers want with her and her child? What kind of official paper might the officer on the left hold in his hand and what might be its result? Helnwein, characteristically, presents us with an ambiguous, haunting image and leaves us to wonder about its meaning. Helnwein's background perhaps helps explain why his often difficult subjects have been interpreted in various, often contradictory, ways by opposing sides of the political debate about World War II. With its huge size, hyperrealist style, and disturbing content, this unsettling work bestows a psychological anxiety accompanied by a strong magnetic pull. Confronting it, we tend to stare-entranced by both its beauty and its seductive, malevolent overtones. ...

La manière la plus dialectique pour recycler, détourner, admirer et critiquer tout à la fois, demeure le médium photographique. Gottfried Helnwein propose des images inconvenantes, qui renvoient la pérennité des objets dérivés de Disney à des statuts diversement fétichistes: images saintes que l'on prie ou statuettes lubriques qui promettent des extases ambiguës. ...

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. ...

21c Museum is North America's first museum dedicated solely to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art of the 21st century and will host a series of guest curators. The 21c collection features both emerging artists and acclaimed international artists, such as video artists Bill Viola and Tony Oursler, photographers, Andres Serrano, Sam Taylor Wood, and David Leventhal, sculptors Yinka Shonibare and Judy Fox, and multimedia artists Chuck Close, Gottfried Helnwein, Red Grooms and Kara Walker. ...

Gottfried Helnwein 出生于维也纳。1969年到1973年在维也纳的the Academy of Fine Arts学习绘画。他吸收了日常生活中比如漫画、广告、电影的美学元素，在这段时间创作了部分超现实主义画作。而这些早期的画作很清楚的表明了他的艺术观，他所想要表达的东西。缠着绷带的孩子，幼稚儿童脸上的撕裂之后再次缝合的伤口。如同爬虫类一样冰冷而无机质毫不感觉痛楚的眼神。画者那种权威而细致的表现伤害的冷静让当时的大众无法接受。71年到73年， Helnwein的作品展览无一不受到抵制。维也纳的一家画廊展出他的画作，结果不到三天就被迫关闭。甚至维也纳附近一座城市的市长下令将 Helnwein的作品没收。当时他的反对者喊出的理由是这些作品是“the Nazis'' term for degenerate art”。因为他对待伤口、死亡、折磨与伤害是带着那样一种天真的热情态度来描写，所以人们忍受不了吗？这个世界有许多无法言说的东西。战争总是扯出人类最黑暗的那一面。而Helnwein就是那样微笑着用他的画笔来揭露出人性。是他的作品是纳粹的垃圾，还是人们始终无法正视内心深处涌动的黑暗冰冷 ...

"She is not as old as she seems, though age, at least in her case, is an elusive notion. In fact, it is her childhood that is fixated, and not out of nostalgia. True, it would take a daring leap of imagination to connect pudgy little hands to the body as it is now, or to visualize the dimples and the baby teeth. The little-girl-who-once-was thought: Maybe I am really dead. Because only dead people get pushed so deep down".
(From: And the Rat Laughed, by Nava Semel).
Helnwein is a great believer in the ability of art to pass emotional memory on, as a reminder of the past or mainly as a warning of what the future might hold, for humanity, as far as he is concerned, has not learnt its lesson. Is there atonement in his artistic endeavors? I prefer the Jewish concept of - tikkun, purification of the soul. It has a deeper meaning than the physical healing of scars, for it elevates us to the highest sphere of the spirit. The wounded girls close their eyes, but they are not blind. Behind their closed lids their gaze is clear and penetrating. ...

Die Zurschaustellung des eigenen Körpers als Verwesungsmasse beginnt mit den Selbstporträts von George Grosz als Suizidgestalt im Kaffeehaus und reicht über die wie durch den Fleischwolf gedrehten Konterfeis eines Francis Bacon bis hin zur Leichenfledderei am eigenen Leib bei Günter Brus, Kurt Kren oder Frank Tovey, dem jüngst verstorbenen Enfant terrible der experimentellen New-Wave-Szene der 1980er Jahre. Die Befreiung des melancholischen Bewusstseins durch den Tod bietet keine philosophische Perspektive mehr. Es ist ihm ohnedies schon anheim gefallen. Stattdessen wird der Suizid in einer Performance masochistischer Selbstverstümmelung kultisch sublimiert.
In einer fotografischen Inszenierung Gottfried Helnweins erhebt sich der Künstler, fäulnisschwarz und monumental wie das Mahnmal einer letzen Einsicht: “So ist Verzweiflung, diese Krankheit im Selbst, die Krankheit zum Tode. Der verzweifelte ist todkrank. Der Tod ist nicht das letzte der Krankheit, aber der Tod ist in einem fort das Letzte. Von dieser Krankheit erlöst zu werden durch den Tod ist eine Unmöglichkeit, denn die Krankheit und deren Qual und der Tod ist gerade, nicht sterben zu können.”
So ist die Geschichte der Moderne nicht zuletzt auch eine Erfolgsgeschichte der Melancholie und des Eindringens ihres schwarzen Spuks in die letzten Paradiese des Seins- und Weltvertrauens. ...

The production of the Disney studios quickly attracted artists, especially from the movie world. Eisenstein and Prokofiev, when they were working on Ivan the Terrible (1945), took an interest in the work of Disney and the conductor Léopold Stokowski on Fantasia. By the mid-sixties Disney enjoyed immense, universal popularity. Since the release of Snow White in 1937, several generations have been raised on his films and have not forgotten them. Pop Art made Mickey and Donald into icons.
As the French painter Robert Combas put it in 1977: “Mickey is no longer Walt’s property, he belongs to us all”. After drawing on Western art from all periods, Disney’s world became in its turn a source of inspiration for artists as diverse as Christian Boltanski, Gottfried Helnwein, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Bertrand Lavier, Peter Saul and Gary Baseman. ...

Continuando la perspectiva del ritual, Günter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Yoko Ono, Saburó Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Gottfried Helnwein, Ushio Shinohara, Peter Wiebel, Otto Muehl, Stelarc (en su etapa inicial de Suspension), entre otros, proponen la exposición de un hecho que sucede en tiempo real y que supera la noción de ficcionalidad o emulación. ...

For the past twenty-four years the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy Foundation, in association with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, has presented a series of film programs featuring the outstanding documentaries of the previous year.
The film, NINTH NOVEMBER NIGHT, was considered by the Academy’s Documentary Screening Committee to be one of the outstanding documentaries of 2004. It is our wish to include a screening of "Ninth November Night" in this prestigious series on the evening of Wednesday, November 30, 2005. ...

この本を読んで何年もたってから、まさにこの女の子に偶然出会ったときは、言いようのない驚きで頭の中が混乱した。『写真都市』（伊藤俊治著）という本で偶然に見つけたのだ。ゴットリープ・ヘルンバインGottfried Helnwein(1948-)というオーストリア生まれのアーティストによるBeautiful Victim II という1974年の作品。 ...

Help us find visual, aural, metaphors that will let others understand the importance of engagement in this process. Look at Helnwein's painting under Visual Sociology. I left it up. What was Helnwein saying? Why was he willing to offend. Why do Beau and Michael want to shake us up? How are those things related? Why did one of my students make a giant box that when opened had a lovely smiling face inside that said "F^&* the Patriot Act"?? Isn't that a lot like what Helnwein and Kiefer and Beuys were doing? Maybe saying "wake up and look at what you're doing?" ...

A virtuoso and a visionary with one eye behind the veil of the world, the other reflecting endless horror, beauty, loss, humour and melancholy - all with a steady hand. The position is supreme, the means are penetrating and the message as deep as it gets. To me the strange silent directness in Helnweins work is unrivaled, no other artist today tells the dim story of the world in a more disturbing and moving way. His work, views and perspectives are completely congruent and appeals to me in a very direct and personal way. ...

Ever since I clicked on it, Gottfried Helnwein’s "American Prayer" (2000) has taken up residency in my mind.
I began to discover a semiotic richness in this painting worthy of what W.J.T. Mitchell has called a "metapicture" - a "picture that [is] used to show what a picture is". Mitchell situates the concept of metapicture in "'iconology', the study of the general field of images and their relation to discourse," thereby cutting across Greenbergian self-reflexivity into an expanded context that includes popular culture as well as contemporary art. In this wider cultural field, a metapicture does more than reflect on the nature of the picture itself and calls into question "the self-understanding of the observer". I will argue that "American Prayer" derives its theoretical relevance partly from its concealed hybridity, from the interplay between technological media and painting. In this work, the substitution of one medium by another reinforces the meaning that can be created from the iconographic substitution of the child by Pinocchio, and the replacement of the deity by Donald. In the end, Donald’s sideways glance at us indicates that this picture is really about us, the observers; it questions our own place in a cultural web of illusionism spun from the abiding human desire to overcome death. ...

...

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents the exhibition Austrian Contemporary Art and Post-war Painting: The Essl Collection, a seminal encounter with the most commanding pictorial propositions engendered in the second half of the 2Oth century.
Gottfried Helnwein digresses from fleeting contemplation with his Self-portrait: the canvas on display prompts an immediate, impulsive reaction... ...

ゴットフリート・ヘルンバイン（1948年10月8日ウィーン生まれ）は、オーストリア系アイルランド人の画家、写真家、兼パフォーマンスアーティスト。
ヘルンバインはウィーン美術アカデミー絵画科（Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien）で学ぶ。同大学にてマスタースクール賞（Meisterschulpreis）、後にカーディナル（枢機卿）ケーニヒ（王）賞、テオドル・ケルナー賞を受賞。
彼の初期の作品は主として傷ついた子供達を描いた超リアリスティックな水彩画、同時に彼は公共の場で実際に子供達を交えてそういったパフォーマンスを披露することも度々あった。ヘルンバインは概念的なアーティストであり、主として心理学的、社会学的な不安感や、歴史的問題、政治的話題を取り上げてきた。結果として彼の作品はしばしば挑発的と受けとめられ、物議をかもしてきた。彼は様々な手法と媒体を用い、画家、デッサン家、写真家、壁画家、彫刻家、そしてパフォーマンスアーティストとして作品を残してきた。ヘルンバインはまた、劇場、バレイ、オペラといった、舞台製作や衣装デザインでも知られている。その中にはハンブルク国立歌劇場、ベルリン・フォルクスビューン劇場やロサンゼルスオペラ座等がある。 ...

도대체 이 사진 작가는 어떻게 접하게 되었을까나?
기억이 잘 안난다.
필시 한창 사진에 대해 끄적끄적일 때,무슨 책에서 본 것 같다.
그리고는 인터넷에서 뒤지다가 그의 공식 홈페이지에 가보게 된 것 일테고. 공식 홈페이지
또한 거기서 독일의 음산한 음악을 하는 밴드인 '램스타인'의 앨범 표지 사진을 이 사람이 한 사실을 알게 되었다. ...

2005-01-28
ヘルンヴァイン作品集
* ゴッドフリート・ヘルンバイン 『ヘルンバイン写真集』（構成・解説=伊藤俊治）（リブロポート, 1989.10.30）
伊藤俊治の文章は貴重だが、何故本書がこのような構成になったのか、疑問を持つ。敢えて「写真集」にすることはなかったのではないか？　これではヘルンヴァインの仕事の十分の一も把握できない。
* Gottfried Helnwein: "HELNWEIN" (Könemann, 1998)
ヘルンヴァインを知りたかったらこれを見るべき。ただし、前にも書いたように精神的にきついものがあることは確か。彼の作品は、我々が通常の生活において無意識のうちに目を背けている「現実」を我々の視覚に突き付ける。ただ、その根底にあるものが何かという問題は、まだ私の中で解決していない。少なくとも、これだけの仕事を続ける精神的エネルギーは並大抵ではない。それが、この世界の現実に対する怒りに基づいているのか、それとも彼の中の闇が密かにそのような表現を求めるのか？ ...

After further examining his work on my computer, I left . . . heart racing several beats faster, fingers tingling. Helnwein reminded me how to feel. It was like the first time I saw a Fellini film or slipped into Tom Ford attire. There was a sense of confidence instilled, a confidence in being human, the confidence to find power through mistake, the confidence to admit to cease yearning for perfection. Rather, redefining perfection to the state of recognizing my humanity, my possibility. ...