A new exhibit called "The Child," through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, presents images of distressed, wounded or threatened children, a topic that has fascinated Helnwein for years.
Many of the children depicted in the show have deformities, bandages, scars or wounds; some appear threatened by menacing adults or by mayhem. Their suffering, indeed wrenching to witness, inevitably becomes a statement about the human condition.
A 55-year-old father of four, Helnwein sees himself as an artist with a message. "A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything," he said. "It's important for certain artists to respond to what's going on in present time."
Curator Robert Flynn Johnson believes it is appropriate to display art with a moral message. "Museums shouldn't be like Rip Van Winkle, in a state of catatonic sleep," he says. "They should take on issues. Otherwise they will be seen just as a low-grade entertainment vehicle. We're not out to shock -- we're out to make people think."
Johnson places Helnwein in the tradition of such contemporary activist artists as filmmakers Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11") and Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"), painter Gerhard Richter and painter Sue Coe, whose "deadmeat prints" include images of animal slaughter.
Museum officials have posted notices in the museum lobby and outside the gallery to warn people that viewer discretion is advised.

Officials at the Legion hope the exhibit will reach an audience that more typically comes to blockbuster shows on classical Egypt or the Old Masters. "If I do a show like this one that upsets the docents,"Johnson says, "I know that I've got a good show." ...

Adding To The Discussion Gottfried Helnwein is an artist whose work - "giant color portraits of stillborn babies, paintings that merge Nazi-archive photographs with pictures Helnwein has taken, enigmatic portrayals of apparently wounded or menaced children" - tends to provoke strong reactions, and in recent years, several individuals have expressed their displeasure with some of his images by defacing them. Helnwein confesses to being initially startled by the vandalism, but these days, he has decided that the viewer has as much to contribute to the larger discussion as the artist, and if people are moved to destroy what he has created, he can at least salute their passion. ...

...the work is extremely ambitious, both in terms of scale and rendering - some paintings are seven metres long and all are so realistic that they are nearly indistinguishable from photographs.
Consequently they cannot fail but to strike a chord, as you marvel at the skill involved in creating such vivid and realistic landscape views. So much so that Fáilte Ireland is surely gaining free advertising, as many will be inspired to venture out and experience these places first hand.
Helnwein re-creates theses vistas using a composite of photographic sources which cram multiple focal points into a single view. The surfaces are absolutely flawless with practically no evidence of the artist's brushwork. Studying the surface is absorbing, as the viewer is immersed in the detail as much as seductive wider views of the vast, undulating topography. ...

Almost 'autobiographical landscapes', the paintings in this exhibition by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein broadly outline the migrations he, and his family, have made from his native Vienna, through Germany, to America and Ireland, his family home since 1997. Yet these landscapes also mark a return to his earliest artistic inspiration. Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes are unashamedly aesthetic and the typically epic, but not inhuman scale, imitates the subject matter with each painting seeming to breathe a sense of a year well advanced, after the effusive growth and floral displays of May. Sunset beckons here and with it, Romanticism. ...

Helnwein's first-ever solo American museum exhibition features paintings, drawings, watercolors and photographs by the Austrian artist famous for his disturbing yet compelling portraits of injured children, whose images he uses to represent innocence lost. ...

From 3 July to 4 September Gottfried Helnwein exhibits some of his large photo-realist landscapes. These really are BIG paintings, with some of the canvases reaching seven metres in length.
So what, you may yawn, but the work has to be seen to be believed.
Helnwein specialises in the classic, dramatic sublime and, not surprisingly, Caspar David Friedrich is cited as an influence. ...

Some of the most powerful images that deal with Nazism and Holocaust themes are by Anselm Kiefer and Helnwein, although, Kiefer’s work differs considerably from Helnwein’s in his concern with the effect of German aggression on the national psyche and the complexities of German cultural heritage. Kiefer is known for evocative and soulful images of barren German landscapes.
But Kiefer and Helnwein’s work are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in a post-war German speaking countries...
William Burroughs said that the American revolution begins in books and music, and political operatives implement the changes after the fact. To this maybe we can add art. And Helnwein's art might have the capacity to instigate change by piercing the veil of political correctness to recapture the primitive gesture inherent in art.

...

"... I believe the cure for any depression is expression in your heart, and Gottfried Helnwein was one of the most supportive people towards me. He was the one who gave me that advice, and he was correct with it.
'Personal Jesus' says everything that I would say if I were to write a song right now. I was listening to it on a CD I just bought because I wanted to really take a step away from the world. I wasn't sure if I was going to put out a 'best of' or if I was going to do anything in general with music, because there's a frustration level that the more commercial you are, the more marginal you are - also, the lack of art that exists in entertainment, and the lack of interest. People are much more content with watching The Real World and reality television, than living their own lives, or watching something that comes from imagination.
You know what it is? It's not even Bush's fault. It's America making itself the Third Reich.
Imagination is a necessity, and I don't think it's sort of bad. I can dream up some image like I did with Helnwein, and they're "bad," they're forbidden, but I can take an image that's far worse, that's on CNN and it's reality. So we can't get censored. It's the real world.
But that's a bad message to send to kids growing up, I think.
('The Golden Age of Grotesque':)
...I was not allowed to put the paintings on the cover of the record! Our anticipation was not to create album artwork. We wanted to collaborate and create something together, and we did not consider the Golden Age of Grotesque to be limited to an album.
...All I can say about it is I'm glad that it makes it into the collection of images that represent me as best as it could. I think that it just scratches the surface of what Gottfried and I could do together"
Marilyn Manson
Los Angeles, July 2004 ...

An urban oasis — The California Palace of the Legion of Honor is San Francisco's most seductively situated museum
From July 31-Nov. 28, the museum will present paintings, drawings and photographs by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. The exhibit, titled "The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein," looks at children as innocent, yet exploited. ...

The Times:
"...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." ...

Like Sylvia Plath, artist Gottfried Helnwein has a near-schizoid attitude toward Germany's National Socialists, producing images of that period ranging from the truly horrible to those bordering on an eerie reverence. Here his work Epiphany I, Adoration of the Magi (1996), in which the central female figure has a Plath-like intensity. ...

Continuing the theme of documenting the landscape, internationally renowned artist Goffried Helnwein will exhibit a number of large-scale photo-realist canvases depicting Irish landscapes. Helnwein lives for much of the year in Co. Tipperary and his paintings illustrate the drama and the beauty of the countryside as well as revealing the changing landscape of Ireland.
Helnwein, (born in Vienna in 1948), is a formidable artist and his work has often been proved controversial, because they function as moral probes. He continually reveals emotive issues within his work practice. ...

...and especially by opening up the discussion to a powerfully engagé photo-realist like Helnwein, 'image and Enigma' proposes further possibilities and more intricate relationships, demonstrating that the energy of the enigmatic image has suffused yet more widely through current artistic practice.
from the unsettled unsettling times we live in, could we expect anything less? And could anything less than a lucid, concentrated collection of such work make the point as urgent as our times require? ...

"The world doesn't like people that are different than the average. Rulers throughout history have always hated those people that stick out of the masses, - the geniuses, the poets, monsters, artists, witches and saints; and usually they burned them or put them in dungeons, concentration-camps or mental institutions, thinking of what a nice and peaceful slave-camp this planet could be without them.
But for some miraculous reason this desert-town here seems to be different than the rest of the world, because here they don't mind these monsters, they actually seem to like them.
L.A. is the sanctuary for people with weird visions and impossible dreams. Maybe it's the last place on earth where dreams are still legal." ...

In November, America celebrated the 75th birthday of Mickey Mouse. In his long history, the world�s most famous rodent has not always lived up to his squeaky-clean image. As the following timeline makes clear, over the decades Mickey has been involved in a host of unsavory activities and turned up in all sorts of surprising and sometimes scandalous places. Mickey Mouse is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a pair of red shorts with yellow buttons...
February 2003: Outside Ozzy Osbourne's Beverly Hills mansion, shock rocker Marilyn Manson and modernist Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein premiere two paintings that will be used as the artwork for Mansons album The Golden Age of Grotesque. The creepy images depict a heavily made-up Manson wearing Mouseketeer ears. ...

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Next season's highlight may be a Der Rosenkavalier directed by Maximilian Schell and designed by Downtown artist Gottfried Helnwein, and including sopranos Adrianne Pieczonka and Elizabeth Futral. ...

Gottfried-Helnwein-Portrait 
Documentary of the Helnwein-retrospective at the Chinese Museum for the Arts and the Forbidden City, Beijing, September 2004, by Claudia Teissig. ...

Alisa Shorr glanced at the teenager with a look of disbelief.
"This is dope," the 17-year-old boy was exclaiming as he looked at the images in the University of Arizona Museum of Art's latest exhibits, "Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation" and "Wit's End: The Art of Laughs, Giggles, Cackles and Guffaws."
"I had never heard that before" uttered in the museum, said Shorr, the museum's spokeswoman.
The double display, on exhibit until Jan. 25, is attracting plenty of interest among teens and young adults who normally avoid the museum. Young people are drawn to the exhibits because both employ comic images - familiar and new cartoon characters - to address serious topics: war, violence, ethnicity, gender, loss of innocence.
Gottfried Helnwein's "American Prayer" incorporates a floating Donald Duck in a young boy's evening prayers, while Phillip Knoll asks the question "What if Superman flew naked?" in his sparse "Real and Imagined." ...

The following suicide notes were left by Japanese schoolchildren, aged ten to fifteen, who killed themselves within the last several years. Some of them met in suicide chat rooms, which are becoming increasingly popular in Japan.
translated from the Japanese by Patrick Luhan. ...