"La función del artista es evocar la experiencia del reconocimiento sorpresivo: mostrarle al espectador lo que él sabe pero no sabe que sabe. Y Helnwein es un maestro del reconocimiento sorpresivo".
William Burroughs
Así describe el mismo Burroughs al austríaco Gottfried Helnwein, maestro del retrato en todas sus formas, principalmente en fotografía y video, aunque también en dibujo y pintura. Su obra se exhibe generalmente en gigantescas instalaciones, y también se extiende al cine y performances teatrales. Considerado por muchos como ‘repulsivo’, lo cierto es que incluso ha llegado a captar las figuras de personalidades como Bukowski, Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed y Keith Richards, entre otros. ...

How easy it is to pass by the things we do not understand and hand out a label that might comfort our ignorance. I could have v-lined for the exit, ignored my curiosity and not given the exhibit another thought. But how could have that helped me? How could I take and grow from that experience? Proverbs says to seek after understanding like silver, to turn my heart to understanding. Because I decided to seek and understand Helnwein’s art, I was able to see the empathy God has blessed him with – the explicit visions he is able to create to awaken our naive hearts to the sound of our children’s pain. ...

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... ...

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. ...

580 ganz- und doppelseitige, hochwertige Farbbilder. Atlasgroßformat. Kiloschwer. Leinen.
Er gilt als "Schockmaler" (Wiener Zeitung), aber seine Provokationen "sind gekonnt gesetzt" (Die Welt). Seine Kunst ist morbide, abgründig, exzentrisch. Seine Figuren sind Opfer, verwundet, entstellt, bandagiert. Crumb hält ihn für einen "very fine artist - and a sick motherfucker". Er sieht sich in der Tradition von Villon, Goya, Poe, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Bacon. Stones Gitarrist Ron Wood: "Helnwein hat über die Jahre einen einzigartigen Stil entwickelt und gilt heute als einer der Größten der Welt."
Dieser opulente Farbband ist die bisher größte und umfangreichste Werkmonografie des gebürtigen Wieners mit Wohnsitzen in Irland und Los Angeles, das Gesamtwerk 1970 bis 1997 zum ersten Mal in einem Band: das grafische Werk, die Aquarelle, Öl- und Mischtechnikbilder, fotografische Arbeiten, die Aktionen und Installationen sowie alle Arbeiten fürs Theater. Mit den Texten von Heiner Müller, William S. Burroughs, H.C. Artmann, Klaus Honnef und Peter Selz. ...

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». ...

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. ...