Kleines Helnwein es la primera obra escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten, hasta el momento un joven asistente a talleres de dramaturgia y actuación. Su fuente de inspiración fue la obra del pintor austríaco Gottfried Helnwein, de quien vio una muestra en Europa, hace tres años. El artista plástico trabajó como escenógrafo en algunas puestas del dramaturgo y director Heiner Müller. El personaje central de su espectáculo surge en escena como escapado de una de las obras del artista para exponer “su distanciamiento ante el dolor y su intimidad, presa en una atmósfera infantil”. En el panel central de la escenografía son proyectados algunos cuadros de Helnwein.
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A year or so back, an exhibition called Sensations caused a few upsets, first in London and then in New York. Central to the reaction was a large-scale portrait of a child-killer assembled from, if I remember correctly, the palm prints of children. So far, so bland. The shock element in art has been much talked about in the last five years but art that actually shocks has been thin on the ground during the same period.
Step forward then, Gottfried Helnwein.
By and large, if art is going to shock, it better have something shocking to say,and it's clear that Helnwein has found that. ...

A blonde Madonna, dressed as if she were spending an evening at the opera, presents her child to the watchful eyes of Nazi SS Guards, One officer looks as if he were studying the child's genitals, perhaps to see whether he has been circumcised. Dark hair parted severely to one side and fleshy baby cheeks lending a slight and comical hangdog expression, the young child presents something of an eerie resemblance to the Führer. ...

The 24-hour city is already a reality for art-lover Lou Reed.
Reed was dining with a friend - the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein - on Sunday night, when he decided he wanted to see Helnwein's new show at the Robert Sandelson Gallery.
"I had just taken to my bed when I got a phone call from Gottfried", says Sandelson. "But I'm an old fan of Lou Reed so I went as I was and opened up at midnight." For nearly an hour, Sandelson stood in his nightwear and "yawned away while they analysed the pictures in detail". ...

Kate Connolly meets Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian who is still confronting his country's Nazi past. It could have been worse. At least he doesn't look like his self-portraits, in which bandages swathe his head, bent forks pull his mouth into a mocking smile and blood drenches his torso. Helnwein, 52, is a master of the scandalous and the art of shocking. The artist Robert Crumb once said of him: "Helnwein is a very fine artist and one sick motherfucker." "You can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the strong and powerful to slide and totter - anything, actually, if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means." ...

Strawinskys Wüstlings-Oper "The Rake's Progress", die Ingo Metzmacher am 10. Juni 2001 gemeinsam mit Jürgen Flimm auf die Bühne hebt.
Als Bühnen- und Kostümbildner fungiert kein anderer als Gottfried Helnwein.
Nach Jörg Immendorfs spektakulärer Salzburger Festspiel-Version eine neue, aufreizende Künstler-Attacke auf das Werk. ...

Helnwein, who grew up in Austria just after the Second World War had, like many others of his generation living in Germany or Austria, found it hard to come to terms with the Nazi past. As with fellow German and Austrian artists Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Hermann Nitsch, there is a sense of being plagued by history in his work, even though he says that art should never be about ideology - "I don't want to teach and explain." ...

This made perfect sense, I thought, considering the visuals attached to their recent album Sehnsucht: portraits of the band by Gottfried Helnwein, the brilliant German artist whose gauze-wrapped and fork-embellished self-portrait had been an album cover for the Scorpions -- you know the one I'm talking about?
Helnwein had photographed the Rammstein faces after mangling and compromising them with arcane medical apparatus; and here I was, with my back mangled and compromised, being photographed by arcane medical apparatus! How very synchronistic it all was!
Why, Helnwein was probably out there right now, conducting the band in their concerted hammerstrikes, perhaps even forming a mini mosh pit with my wife or discussing the finer points of arcane medical apparatus-based face-mangling with the MRI tech! Of course! And there were streamers, too! Multicolored streamers that descended from the antiseptic rafters and twisted and shimmered like silken snakes dancing in time to the music ... ...

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One piece of public art he did in 1988 - funded fully by himself, after he failed to raise sponsorship - commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. "Again, what amazed me was that nobody talked about it - and yet that was when the horror really started."

"I wanted to do it in front of the Dome in Cologne, but the City prevented it. But there was this little strip of land which belonged to the railways, and a guy who worked there said, 'go ahead'. I didn't want to use these historic photographs which are used too often - those mountains of corpses mean nothing anymore - so I used four metre high children's faces. I photographed children from the area, foreign children, German children, Jews, anything." Mounted in a long billboard line, after the huge word "Selection", the children's faces were powdered in a deathly, bruised way, many with their eyes closed. That may sound subtle, but in the context of muted German Holocaust memorials, it was like a slap in the face. Despite CCTV video-cameras, someone painstakingly sliced the throats of every single child-portrait. ...