In the Republican Last Chance Saloon is a Norman Rockwell-style McCain, talking tough about Czechoslovakia, Iraq and jobs with blue-collar workers. (How early 1990s of him.) They paint Obama as a 1950s-style Gottfried Helnwein figure. But instead of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean in the diner, Obama sits alongside Paris and Britney. McCain gives new meaning to "Audacity Watch" with his sexually provocative, racially charged, dumbed-down subliminal ad campaign ...

Waterford Fringe Festival will present a spectacular outdoor exhibition of Helnweins work in Sept of this year. The exhibition involves a series of his paintings screen printed to very large images and displayed on prominent Waterford city centre premises. ...

An alternative title to “Angels Sleeping” for this exhibition could be “All Hail to the Wounded Child,” as many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwien’s works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us, not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs and disturbances.
If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition, it would be a long, endless scream. ...

What do Marilyn Manson, Mickey Mouse, violence against children and Nazism have in common? There may be a few ways to answer that question, but Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition, Angels Sleeping, brings these topics together most powerfully, and might expose a few feelings of anguish you never knew you had.
If you have yet to experience the hyper-realistic paintings of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, head to the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague at once. The art on offer spans his work from the 1970s up to the present day, split into five key sections that explore his most common themes of psychological and sociological suffering, with paintings so realistic you’ll question your own eyes. ...

Helnwein in the Rudolfinum Gallery The exhibition entitled “Angels Sleeping” introduces works by the Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein, whose oeuvre has become a phenomenon of hyperrealist painting. His canvases, executed in the manner of photographic preciseness, draw from pop-culture as well as history, and the artist’s great subject is the position of a child in an extreme situation. The exhibition is divided to five sections which present the main subjects of Helnwein’s work, at the same time laying emphasis on his paintings from the most recent years. The first section displays portraits of the artist’s bandaged face; the second section contains references to the Nazi past of Austria, while the central subject of the third and fourth sections is child. The last section presents photographs inspired by pop-culture. The group of exhibited works was loaned from the property of the artist as well as from many public and private collections from Europe and the United States ...

Some might think that Los Angeles - its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane." ...

The drama of Amstetten throws the light on a crime that happens behind the facades of apparently respectable families. This painting of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein expresses the anguish of the child's soul. The artist, who lives in Ireland, called this watercolor fom the 70s "Song I".
Helnwein's whole work thematizes pain, injury and violence of and against children. ...

In February 2008 Kresnik presented the final production of his ensemble, based on Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle, in Berlin. Kresnik's Ring was created in collaboration with the painter and scenic designer Gottfried Helnwein, who expresses himself in his works of art just as politically as Kresnik. This is apparent with the poster to the production, which was also created by Helnwein: the head of an exhausted child lying in a pool of blood, overwhelmed by a heap of Euro coins. Kresnik and Helnwein argue on the topics power and money, force and war. ...

Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition I Walk Alone is pretty unnerving, and that is his point. Large-scale photo-realistic paintings confront the viewer like a series of film stills forming a bizarre and disturbing sequence of nightmares. Using digital photography and computer-generated images combined with classical painting techniques, many of the images are only black and white, while others use one additional color, such as red, to dramatic and horrifying effect.
The images might be seen as bits of individual stories, or pieced together in a variety of frightful ways, or seen as a generalized narrative of brutality and terror, in which innocence is perhaps relative. We are all implicated in Helnwein’s unfolding dramas. ...

"Finally we are living now in a society that is a combination of what Huxley foresaw in his "Brave new World" and Orwell in his "1984". We are caught in a stream of constant propaganda and we are under total surveillance. This is the Age of materialism, consumerism and decadence. Our heroes are idiots like trash-princess Paris Hilton, in their sad 15 minutes of fame. Children are shooting other children in schools before they kill themselves and in other parts of the world they blow themselves up in the middle of crowds.
Doesn't that look like the end of a civilization, the second fall of Rome?" ...