Wie wird aus der Mauer Kunst? Man muss sie nur neu aufstellen (in 300 Kilo leichten Einzelteilen), ins rechte Licht setzen (mit Halogenspots vor dunklem Hintergrund) und das historische Drumherum erläutern (in einer eigens angefertigten Zeitung). Ach ja, durch berühmte Künstlerhände sollten die Brocken natürlich auch noch gegangen sein, zum Beispiel durch die von Arman, Armleder, Buren, Castelli, Chillida, Helnwein, Kabakov, Long, Noir und dreißig anderen. So jedenfalls macht es das Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, das rund um den 40. Jahrestag des Mauerbaus in der Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle der Stadt Köln die Sammlung von Mauerfragmenten des französischen Ausstellungsvermittlers Sylvestre Verger zeigt: 1989 - Berliner Mauer. ...

Austrian born artist Gottfried Helnwein's work is also of exemplary value, beginning with bandage action events (documented by the artist appearing in cafe's and lying in the street with his "wounded" head and face bandaged). His work depicts physical injuries which are metaphors for far deeper existential, psychological and human tragedies. Medical injuries, facial deformities and abused children proliferate throughout his work evoking primary internal anxieties. The inhumane acts of violence (child abuse, war atrocities, state oppression) and frightening images of familial estrangement that are presented in his work, constitute events which are preferred forgotten, like the nazi era, or preferred left unspoken such as familial traumas like child abuse. Helnwein also conducts a probing analysis of the individual and the self through an abundance of self portraits, each obscured by hideous facial bandages, his facial muscles, lips and eyes are stretched apart, torturingly, by varied medical instruments, now made famous by the Rammstein covers. All his images in some way evoke associations with mutilation, anguish or internal alienation. The works (frequently paintings appearing remarkably like photographs), boldly put forward social unacceptabilities never before portrayed so lucidly and so confrontingly. The many intensities produced in the work are profoundly disturbing, the impressions - uncomfortably eerie, electrocuting the eyes with a rush of haunting spatiality. ...

Автор: D.Green  
Работа поступила 26/2/2001 и уже получила 274 баллов

Kleines Helnwein está considerada de interés nacional y cultural, obtuvo una mención de honor en el concurso de obras teatrales Atahualpa del Cioppo 1999 y su publicación, además de recibir varias nominaciones para los premios teatrales Trinidad Guevara y ACE (Asociación de Cronistas del Espectáculo), y ser seleccionada para el Festival Internacional de Teatro GREC (Barcelona 2001) ...

Kleines Helnwein escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten se inspira en la estética del artista plástico contemporáneo Gottfried Helnwein.
"Kleines Helnwein"
Autor: Rodrigo Malmsten
Elenco: Belén Blanco, Martín Von Tumpling
Música original y en vivo: Mariano Durand y Marcelo Vignolo.
Coproducción del Teatro General San Martín
En el Callejón de los Deseos -Humahuaca 3759 ...

Su gato siamés trata de robar cámara en la sesión fotográfica: extiende su cuerpo como su dueña, se para donde le indica el fotógrafo, mira al objetivo con sus ojos verdes. O deambula llamando la atención por el luminoso departamento donde computadora, libros y revistas expresan el ordenado desorden de esta actriz de 25 años que obtuvo el premio ACE a la actuación en espectáculo off por su labor en Kleines Helnwein, y una invitación para participar con esa obra en el festival Grec 2001, de Barcelona. ...

Any artist who sites Donald Duck and Jesus Christ as the most important influences in their art must be worth taking a look at.
In the row of pristine gallery fronts in London's Cork street, you cannot miss Gottfried Helnwein's show; it's the one with the gigantic Mickey Mouse staring out at you.
The Robert Sandelson Gallery has given us a stunning show of the infamous, Austrian born artist's recent work. Helnwein is on a mission to find the answers to questions that no-one in Austria would give him; such as why the post-war republic portrayed itself as a victim rather than as one of the first main perpetrators of Nazism. ...

In 'The Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous. Much of the work has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child's world are rent with something untoward. For children, not understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape.
Perhaps nothing in the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein's 'Mickey'. His portrait of Disney's favotite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer. This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed.
Helnwein's Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless.
But Mickey's terrifying demeanor hints of things to come. ...

These are the images of a man consumed by free will. A man with a gift and a craft and a passion to challenge the mediocrity of what has already been established. A man whose opinions embody everything authority does not want you to believe in. His name is Gottfried Helnwein, and he recently discussed his 30+ year career with Tastes Like Chicken's Insane Wayne Chingsang. ...

The Book Bukowski in Pictures is the first pictorial biography of cult writer, Charles Bukowski. The writer's extraordinary private and public life is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, most published for the first time. Extracts from Bukowski's poetry and prose are sprinkled throughout, together with drawings, cartoons, manuscripts, rare broadsides and personal letters. It features powerful new portraits of Bukowski by leading photographers such as Gottfried Helnwein and Tony Lane, former art director of Rolling Stone, as well as work by R.Crumb. All photographs have detailed captions by biographer Howard Sounes who has also written a powerful introductory text with new revelations gleaned from Bukowski's recently declassified FBI file. The end result is a fascinating life in pictures that will be essential for all Bukowski fans. ...

...

HEY, there's Mickey Mouse at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art!
Wait a minute. That's not my perky little pal from ''Steamboat Willie.'' This Mickey looks a little mean. This Mickey looks like Michael Eisner's id. Nice Mickey. Don't hurt me. Here's a dollar.
That's how it goes at ''The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection,'' perhaps the first show to suggest that there are indeed monsters under the bed, and you might as well get used to it.
SFMOMA curatorial associate Heather Whitmore Jain struck the perfect note by opening the show with Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's massive and menacing oil and acrylic ''Mickey.''
It's hard to imagine another contemporary symbol so perfectly balanced between beloved childhood icon and its day job as a corporate logo. Helnwein chooses an earlier Mickey, with the smaller, darker eyes and the longer, more ratlike nose to help make his point. With his pasted-on smile and forward lunge, this Mickey looks more ready to negotiate cable and Web rights than to comfort a preschooler. ...

Kunstenaar Gottfried Helnwein daagt uit met zijn gemanipuleerde beelden van de werkelijkheid. Vooral politieke figuren, uit verleden en heden, zijn in zijn werk de klos. Heimat Oostenrijk heeft hij moeten ontvluchten. Bas Groes sprak hem: ‘Isolatie helpt niet, zonder dialoog verandert er niets. ...

Deutschbauer:
"Was sind am Schluss eines Buches für gewöhnlich Ihre Gedanken?"
Maler Gottfried Helnwein:
"Ich habe Bücher gern, die mich am Ende hängen, ratlos lassen.
Da fange ich dann an nachzudenken."
Gottfried Helnwein über "Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit" von Marcel Proust.

With ironic images of toys and cartoon figures, a number of contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors take incisive aim at the emotional underbelly of childhood in The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from September 1, 2000, through January 2, 2001. Explaining how these representations question deeply rooted social mores, this exhibition includes over 30 playful and wicked works-drawn from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan-by such contemporary artists as Gottfried Helnwein, David Levinthal, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Laurie Simmons and Hung Tung-lu. As Kent Logan states, "Of the themes in our collection this exhibition will explore what I like to call 'Children's Hour.'" ...

Austrian artist Gottfired Helnwein's powerful and haunting paintings provide a disturbing commentary on Nazism and the Holocaust, regularly provoking outraged reactions from right-wingers in his native land and in Germany. "I was amazed how much pictures could reach into the hearts and minds of people - and how much they would talk to me about it," he told the JC. "For me, art is like a dialogue. My art is not giving answers, it is asking questions." ...

Helnwein, the controversial Austrian artist whose works is currently on show at the Robert Sandelson gallery in London, has always been a difficult personality to pin down.
He chose to exhibit all three "Epiphany" paintings alongside a series of photographs of 19th century stillborn foetuses in an exhibition entitled "Apokalypse". Hung together in a Dominican church in Weinstadt in Austria, the final effect was one of haunting beauty, each child framed magnificently within the high vaulted ceiling of the church. The juxtaposition of these serene yet poignant images of "beings that never were" placed next to paintings that recalled the ideological terrors of the past, created a synthesis of values as politically dynamic as they were aesthetically entrancing. Yet throughout his career as an artist Helnwein has never ceased to use his work as a way to question his immediate surroundings. ...

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.
...

“Kleines Helnwein”, escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten. Con Belén Blanco y Martin von Tumpling. Música: Mariano Durand y Marcelo Vignolo. En El Callejón de los Deseos, los viernes a las 21.30.
ADMIRABLE actuación de Belén Blanco en esta pieza fascinante.

Con su impecable dominio técnico, comparable con el de los maestros antiguos, el austríaco Gottfried Helnwein (52) puede ser un agudo pintor mundano y también un minucioso cronista del espanto desatado en el mundo por el afán de poder y la exasperación de la violencia. El joven director, autor y también actor Rodrigo Malmsten, formado, entre otros maestros, junto a Daniel Veronese y Alejandro Tantanián (“El periférico de objetos”), parte de la pintura de Helnwein para mostrar, en forma de drama, cómo esa violencia, impersonal y en cierto modo clínica, degrada al hombre hasta convertirlo en un objeto, en otra máquina de destrucción (y también, naturalmente, de autodestrucción). ...

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. ...