« L'intolérance et la violence sont les thèmes qui m'intéressent, mais aussi les icônes de notre temps : les idoles. » Depuis 1980, Helnwein travaille à une série appelée « Visages ». ...

At nights my room was plunged into a deep, red light - my toys, the furniture, my bed, my hands - everything had the same color and seemed to be made of the same soft material. As though the natural laws were suddenly suspended, all matter seemed to glow from the inside out. The explanation for this red magic was the large illuminated star of the Red Army on the roof of the factory across the street, which poured it’s fire nightly into my room. ...

Nachts war mein Kinderzimmer in ein tiefes rotes Licht getaucht - meine Spielsachen, die Möbel, mein Bett, meine Hände - alles hatte die gleiche Farbe und schien aus demselben weichen Material zu sein. Als wären die Naturgesetze aufgehoben, schien alle Materie von innen heraus zu glühen.
Die Ursache dieser roten Wundernächte war der riesige leuchtende Stern der Roten Armee auf dem Dach der Fabrik gegenüber, der nachts seine Glut in meine Kinderstube goß. ...

"Anna aus, ich glaube, Kiel", war die unübersehbare Hauptfigur bei der Eröffnung der Ausstellung des österreichischen Malers Gottfried Helnwein im Russischen Museum in Sankt Petersburg.
Wenn Kunst aus dem Westen den Weg nach Russland findet - um dort zu bleiben -, stehen zwei den Petersburgern inzwischen wohlbekannte Namen dahinter:
Irene und Peter Ludwig, die dem Russischen Museum wieder eine Schenkung gemacht haben.
Mit jeder seiner exakt gezeichneten Hautporen und jeder Wimper ist dieses Kind Subjekt - und nicht nur einfach Objekt für einen Maler, der Gigantismus mit Detailversessenheit kombiniert.
"Menschlichkeit im Riesenmass", interpretierte Ludwig das Bild. ...

"...When I look at a work of Art I ask myself: does it challenge me, does it touch, move or inspire me? Do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me - do I get excited, upset?
That is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any information about art? I’ve always had a problem with art that you can only understand if you have a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories in general. Most of them are bullshit anyway.
Most critics and theorists have little respect for artists, and I think the importance of theory in art is totally overrated. Real art is self-evident. Real art is intense, challenging, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Like the Blues, a poem of Rimbaud or Rembrandt's late self-portraits.
Art is not logic, and if you really want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something spiritual that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul. Think of Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Mozart, Howling Wolf, Goya, Bukowski or Robert Crumb - do you need to know the theories that some busybodies might attach to their art in order to experience it?
Marcel Duchamp said: "The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity."
These two poles is all you need. ...

...these photo-paintings appear even more real than a photograph: they are hyper-real, super-saturated depictions of the world that surrounds us, as we would like to see it. Helnwein’s landscapes offer us the world as we see it in our mind’s eye, our memories.
What is certain is that with these works Helnwein has raised the bar for artists to come with art that is groundbreaking in terms of scale, skill and vision. Painted mountains, fields and sky can never be the same again. ... ...

Her lips are parted and colored a luscious deep red. The pancake makeup on her face gives off a marble-white glow. A jacket, adorned with braided gold epaulets at the shoulders, yawns open, exposing a wide expanse of skin down her chest. She appears to be about 8 years old.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the subject of Gottfried Helnwein's new, large-format digital prints at San Francisco's Modernism Gallery might have alarmed or even scandalized a viewer. Not anymore -- or at least not so reflexively...
Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.
But the most haunting images, here and across town at Modernism, may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes. ...

TOKYO

Interview with Gottfried Helnwein
Interviewer: ITO Toshiharu
Translation: ENDO Tohru
ゴットフリート・ヘルンヴァイン インタビュー
インタヴュアー： 伊藤俊治
遠藤徹　訳 ...

Artist of inner Turmoil.
Gottfried Helnwein's works from the 1980's are represented by the self-portraits in his "Black Mirror" series. However, these works reach far beyond the boundaries of the ordinary self-portrait. They reflect the inner wants and desperation which lies within the viewer's own self. Helnwein points out the new form of the modern self-portrait which involves the creator and viewer alike. ...

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it.
I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does.
Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas.
A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this.
This level of work is earned."
Sean Penn ...