Gottfried Helnwein’s photography project “Ninth November Night," a spectacular work of art that recalls the destruction of the synagogues during the so-called “Reichskristallnacht,” was itself the target of an attack.
On Monday night an unknown person destroyed all seventeen child portraits with knife slashes. The portraits had been set up between the Museum Ludwig and the Dome of Cologne.
Helnwein had financed the project himself. ...

The lane of pictures between Ludwig Museum and the Dome of Cologne is one hundred meters long. Each panel is 4 meters high. There are thousands of people daily passing by the rear platform of the cathedral and by far the majority of them, only accustomed to the language of billboard-advertising, are baffled, indignant and shocked at the pale children’s faces, printed on large sheets of vinyl. The city council and museums of Cologne receive dozens of calls daily, finding themselves forced into a position of explanation and justification.
The Installation had barely been set up, when the first damage occurred: At night the large-sized child portraits, which had been made to appear distorted and old by the use of makeup, were slashed with knives; one picture was stolen. ...

Gottfried Helnwein: Called the 'Razor Blade Rembrandt' or 'the Boris Karloff of Art', Helnwein is the man most Austrians love to hate. He schocks people.
His paintings are scenes from every-day life, highly realistic, but there's a sharp, morbid streak in many of them. Children with razors, faces under extreme stress or in fear or in pain. Intensly human, often savage, but always stunning.
I found him to be a sensitive, warm human being. ...

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Master of the grotesque, this shock artist has convulsed European society with his portraits of emotional violence
His portraits reveal characters convulsed by powerful feelings. The uneasy, spastic potency of their emotions leaves us unsure whether they are laughing or crying, in pain or ecstasy.
Whatever the interpretation, one cannot fail to notice that Helnwein delivers a powerful Heimlich maneuver to the solar plexus of our times. ...

Viennese painter Gottfried Helnwein, who specializes in exaggerated expressions, was brought to the U.S. to photograph "the typically American look" art-director Hoglund desired. Hoglund's assistants Dorothy Chapman and Charlotte Quiggle rounded up a dozen TIME staffers to pose for preliminary photographs. "The final painting was a composite based mainly on Associate Editor Jim Kelly," Hoglund says.
Kelly thinks the honor "dubious". ...

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Baumgartner Galleries is introducing the work of Gottfried Helnwein, a young Viennese artist who shares what seems to be an Austrian obsession with highly detailed realism - with a surrealistic edge. Trained at the Austrian Academy, and now in the process of moving to New York, Helnwein makes figurative drawings and watercolors that are occasionally gruesome, sometimes haunting and always ambiguous. Spatial and narrative ambiguity are, in fact, the central expressive devices in Helnwein's art. ...

With an open letter and the picture of a dead child lying with its head in a plate of poisoned food "Lebensunwertes Leben" (Life Unworthy of Life) he protests against Austria's number one forensic psychiatrist, the former euthanasia doctor, Dr. Gross, who admitted in an interview that in the Nazi era he had poisoned hundreds of children and called this method of killing humane. ...

Gottfried Helnwein is trying to detach himself from the influences of Vienna School and to open up a completely new world. The lasses and figures he paints almost always bear some sort of surgical scar and the canvas it teemed with a sadistic aroma. His sadism, however, is quite different from the gloomy Middle Ages type. He tries to drag it out under the sun. His "Ruthless Republic"is something which Pop Art intentionally averted. The artist gives light to the shadows with a strong sun. Herein we see Helnwein's over-sensitive logic and his sensibility. ...