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. ...

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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. ...

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Marilyn Manson: "Gottfried Helnwein whom I collaborated with a lot invited us to get married at one of his castles in either Germany or Ireland," Manson said. "So we thought we would just have the pageantry and the ceremony of a normal wedding, but without the church. Because I don't think that I would really be welcome there." ...

:: Gottfried Helnwein :
»Andy Warhol, New York« [1983]
»Arnold Schwarzenegger, Los Angeles« [1984]
»William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, USA« [1990]
»Michael Jackson, Köln« [1988]
»Willy Brandt, Bonn« [1989]
»Keith Richards, Berlin« [1990] ...

Austrian-born and educated and now living Los Angeles, Helnwein employs a hyperrealist manner that will remind Americans of Gerhard Richter but, if anything, works to opposite effect. Rather than re-confirm post-modernist cynicism, Helnwein rekindles post-war anguish. This selection, going back more than three decades, emphasizes his preoccupation with the image of the child, from early Nitsch- and Schwarzkogler-influenced photo-actions (with the requisite bandages) to recent large portrait-like heads and depictions of Christ-child-like babes attracting odd, menacing crowds. A perverse streak runs through the images, but it’s not pederasty: tinged with surrealism, it’s an enduring shame and anger at the Nazi past – and the artist’s suspicion that Naziism hasn’t been eradicated. ...

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. ...

...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. ... ...