BOCHUM, GERMANY - MARCH 28: Gottfried Helnwein presents his award during the Steiger Awards ceremony at the Jahrhunderthalle on March 28, 2009, in Bochum, Germany. ...

The Israeli Opera Tel Aviv-Yafo will celebrate its upcoming 25th season (as well as Tel Aviv's 100th anniversary) with a program that features seven operas and a musical.
The Child Dreams - an opera by Israeli composer Gil Shohat, based on Hanoch Levin's play - will have its world premiere in January 2010. The opera will be directed by the artistic director of the Cameri Theater, Omri Nitzan, with sets and costumes designed by Gottfried Helnwein - who is familiar to local opera buffs for his amazing Der Rosenkavalier a few years ago. ...

The Austro-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein is responsible for the artworks in this issue. With his hyper-realistic pictures, whose most common subjects are pain, injury and violence, Helnwein (born in 1948) is certainly one of the best-known and at the same time most controversial of German-speaking artists. ...

Peter Plate’s novel “Soon the Rest Will Fall,” just released in paperback from Seven Stories Press. The terrifying Gottfried Helnwein image so perfectly embodies the title of this dark novel that it seems the latter could be the former’s caption (the Helnwein is actually called “The Resurrection of the Child”). ...

Barry Friedman, who exhibited for the first time last year after the organizers shifted the event to coincide with ABMB, said: " This is a great fair. Last year I made $2m in the first 24 hours, although with the economic climate this year, I'll be ecstatic if I make a quarter of that." On the opening night he sold several pieces, including Gottfried Helnwein's startling 2003 photographic print "The Golden Age 37", which went to an existing New York client. ...

''Art Miami has done a really good job,'' said Miami collector Dennis Scholl, echoing an oft-heard sentiment at Tuesday's VIP opening, a charity event for Lotus House.
Among works for sale: Gottfried Helnwein's photographs of Marilyn Mason at Barry Friedman gallery; Roy Lichtenstein's Water Lily at Galerie Terminus and an eye-catching photo of President-elect Barack Obama by Martin Scholler at Hasted Hunt Gallery. ...

Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Chris­tian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think."
Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is still infused with an uneasy ideal­ism.
His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a vet­eran rock star and the lifestyle to match it.
The Sunday Times, Gerry McCarthy ...

It’s a foggy, cloud-streaked afternoon in Waterford County, Ireland. I’m meeting a man who has spent a large part of his life on this island that is famously steeped in tradition. He’s called this place home for some while. Ireland has a long history of treating its artists, literary figures and musicians well. ...

The bride wore a flowing purple Vivienne Westwood number over her trademark cinched corset. Manson was his normal sepulchral white self, with black make-up and lipstick as they exchanged vows by candlelight in Ireland, at Gothic Castle Gurteen Le Poer in Kilsheelan, Co Tipperary.
A designer-fest costing an estimated $500,000, the bride wore Christian Louboutin shoes to trip up the aisle while the groom wore a John Galliano black-silk taffeta tux. They exchanged their vows at midnight in the home of their artist friend Gottfried Helnwein and the invited guest list was studded with showbiz royalty, including Madonna, Keanu Reeves, David Lynch, Lisa Marie Presley, and Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. ...

Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Chris­tian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think."
Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is still infused with an uneasy ideal­ism.
His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a vet­eran rock star and the lifestyle to match it. ...

WITH some of his "The Last Child" instal­lations reaching a massive 120ft, Austri­an born artist Gottfried Helnwein has been causing quite some controversy around Waterford City. ...

LARGE-scale art installations dotted around Waterford’s city centre depicting war images are causing controversy because of their graphic content.
The exhibition, The Last Child, by Austrian-born and Waterford-based artist Gottfried Helnwein, is part of the Waterford Fringe Festival and includes a variety of work placed at strategic locations in the city, such as the Quays, the Clock Tower, City Hall and John Roberts Square. Among the material featured in the images are depictions of children with guns and a child lying down, covered with blood, as well as various shots of children with their eyes closed, as if dead. ...

“For me, the reaction so far in Waterford is very good because people are talking about the theme of war and exploitation. For a child to grow up now, it’s the toughest time ever because children are flooded with violence in the media and internet and computer games where the only thing to do is kill people and they are very graphic. Entertainment is very violent but as long as it’s entertainment, it’s fine, but as soon as you do it as art, people get very sensitive. In my art I’m only reflecting the world and I wanted to raise awareness and make people think.” ...

"For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, has assembled a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein’s works and provided an insightful essay on his art in this exhibition catalogue.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses." ...

Clive Wilkinson's renovation of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, made him a design star. But the 53-year-old architect had never designed a house before he started on his own, in West Hollywood. ...

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 ...

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.
Tony Ozuna, The Prague Post, 02. July 2008 ...

It’s immediately obvious that Angels Sleeping is going to be both powerful and unsettling. The first picture that catches the eye, “Modern Sleep I” (Moderní spánek I), is of a young girl wearing only a man’s jacket that brings to mind a Nazi uniform. A tear is in the corner of her eye and she appears to be looking fixedly at some object outside the painting’s scope. The light on her sweet-looking face and flashes of bare skin gives a sense of vulnerability and innocence that combines uncomfortably with how she is dressed. It creates a sense of foreboding in any observer thinking about what circumstances could lead to her being dressed this way. This is just the beginning of images that bring the maltreatment of children to the forefront, in particular Helnwein’s merciless references his country’s Nazi past. ...

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. ...