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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). ...

Yesterday morning I went over to the Legion of Honor to see the Gottfried Helnwein show, "The Child". After all the build-up and warnings about the darkness of his work, I was surprised at the beauty and humor I found there. There are some superficial similarities between Helnwein and Gerhard Richter, but while Richter is the better painter technically, Helnwein (more of a conceptual artist) has more heart. In both cases, they're telling us the world sucks. But Helnwein also sees the good, the beautiful, and the possibilities for redemption. ...

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. ...

[Aug. 16th, 2004|08:07 pm]
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For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, has assembled a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein’s works and provided an insightful essay on his art in this exhibition catalogue.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses. Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public.
The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society. ...

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. ...

Alright, I found this art a while back while looking through various art websites and it is pretty amazing, though VERY odd. Watercolor Paintings ...

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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. ...

When I was in seventh grade, I was always bullied. Now in eight grade, the bullying has become worse. They make fun of me, throw things at me, kick me, hit me, and do other violent things. It was a waste of time complaining to the teacher when I couldn't tolerate it. They'd throw my textbooks at me and harass me for telling the teacher. I have no friends who sympathize with me in class. My close friends in clubs outside school have learned to hate me, too. I'm too tired to hold out any longer. The world's not right for me.
...

Adding To The Discussion 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. Helnwein confesses to being initially startled by the vandalism, but these days, he has decided that the viewer has as much to contribute to the larger discussion as the artist, and if people are moved to destroy what he has created, he can at least salute their passion. ...

Har du nogle kunstneriske forbilleder? I så fald, hvem? Og har det påvirket din tegnestil?
Uuh, der er mange! Hmm, nogle af mine store forbilleder er Ashley Wood, Gotfried Helnwein, Cam De Leon og selvfølgelig min mester fra tegneskolen her i Viborg som har betydet min absolut største fremgang Artem Alexeev, men også folk som Jean-Michel Basquiat og Jackson Pollock .... ser jeg utroligt meget op til! Jeg har 100´vis af forbilleder, men dette må regnes for nogle af de største! De har påvirket mig rigtig meget!
Også musikalsk har jeg mange forbilleder, de afspejles så til gengæld sjældent i mine billeder, men er folk alligevel intereserede er der nogle links i min profil til lidt af hvert. ...

Gottfried Helnwein (Viena, 1948
1948: Nace en Viena
1969/73: Estudia pintura en la Academia de Fine Art en Viena y realiza sus
primeras exposiciones para audiencias pequeñas.
1979: Protesta contra el psiquiatra forense número uno de Austria, Dr. Gross, que admitió en una entrevista que en la era Nazi, él había envenenado a centenares de niños.
1985: Se muda a Alemania, vive y trabaja en un castillo cerca de Cologne, comienzan a producir los cuadros que se componen de varias piezas, Helnwein examina de cerca áreas del taboo y aborda términos tales como arte sub-humana, degenerada y vida indigna de vida. En este mismo año Rudolf Hausner propone a Helnwein como su sucesor y como cabecilla de los profesores para los pintores en la academia de artes visuales en Viena. ...

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein
31. jul. 2004 - 28. nov. 2004
Lincoln Park, San Francisco
http://www.thinker.org/legion/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?exhibitionkey=407 ...

Al famoso museo Legion of Honor di San Francisco è stata inaugurata la prima mostra personale negli Stati Uniti dell’artista austriaco. 19 dipinti, più di 20 foto, 13 disegni ed acquarelli documentano il percorso artistico di Helnwein (*Vienna 1948) dagli anni ’70 fino ad oggi. ...

San Francisco Chronicle - Monday August 9 -
Gottfried Helnwein likes to stand shoulder to shoulder with museum patrons when they look at his work, but he doesn't bask in his own glory. ...

The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein
31.7. - 28.11.
Fine Arts Museum of San Franscico, 2501 Irving Street (at 26th Avenue) , 94122 San Francisco, CA USA

The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein ...