Gottfried Helnwein's classic yet unnerving images transform sentimental representations of childhood into portraits of individual subjects frozen at the moment of suffering. His photo-paintings pirouette on the fine line between chocolate box pictures/excessive sentimentality and the cost to children of being treated as commodities, of suffering emotional or physical pain at a grown-up's hands.
High pictorial and technical values create compositions that recall contemporary cinema and seventeenth-century painting, expanding the treatment of time into epic. This apparent grandiosity plays against the immediacy of each suffering subject, underlining the different experience of time in childhood. Small hurts can devastate when you're a child. Big hurts stay with you for years, as survivors of Hitler's Anschluss testify.
Now, in the age of virtual use and abuse of children, Helnwein's insistence on valuing the humanity and charm of the littlest, the least powerful, offers a counterpoint to claims that suffering counts most when you're grown-up. It opens his practice into a series of pictorial mise-en-scènes, as did Rembrandt's tableaux in The Blinding of Samson (1636) or The Night Watch (1642). ...

Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin. Of all his paintings, the most disturbing is Epiphany (1996), for which he dips into our collective memory of Christianity's most famous birth. This Austrian Catholic Nativity scene has no magi bearing gifts. Madonna and child are encircled by five respectful Waffen SS officers palpably in awe of the idealised, kitsch-blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on Mary's lap, stares defiantly out of the canvas. Helnwein's baby Jesus is Adolf Hitler.
(Julia Pascal, New Statesman, UK, "Nazi Dreaming", April 10, 2006) ...

Gottfried Helnwein's Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi) is a strange takeoff on a traditional New Testament theme in art. The work depicts a Madonnalike mother displaying her baby to attentive Nazi officers, Painted in hyperrealist grisaille with chiaroscuro effects, the work resembles an old documentary photograph made huge. The eerie, sinister overtones are unmistakable. Who is this mother? What do these officers want with her and her child? What kind of official paper might the officer on the left hold in his hand and what might be its result? Helnwein, characteristically, presents us with an ambiguous, haunting image and leaves us to wonder about its meaning. Helnwein's background perhaps helps explain why his often difficult subjects have been interpreted in various, often contradictory, ways by opposing sides of the political debate about World War II. With its huge size, hyperrealist style, and disturbing content, this unsettling work bestows a psychological anxiety accompanied by a strong magnetic pull. Confronting it, we tend to stare-entranced by both its beauty and its seductive, malevolent overtones. ...

The facade of Disney and America in the guise of the Mouse is one of the things that Helnwein and others present to us. Claes Oldenburg took the facade to its literal extreme when he proposed a flat Mouse's image for a facade to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and produced a flat Mouse sculpture. Helnwein, Oldenburg and others are using the Mouse to make social and cultural comments about our society, in the broadest sense, but with humor. ...

21c Museum is North America's first museum dedicated solely to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art of the 21st century and will host a series of guest curators. The 21c collection features both emerging artists and acclaimed international artists, such as video artists Bill Viola and Tony Oursler, photographers, Andres Serrano, Sam Taylor Wood, and David Leventhal, sculptors Yinka Shonibare and Judy Fox, and multimedia artists Chuck Close, Gottfried Helnwein, Red Grooms and Kara Walker. ...

"In memory of the children of Europe who have to die of cold and hunger this Xmas", was written on the draft of a poster in the winter of 1945 by the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka who emigrated to London. He had 5000 copies printed at his own cost and posted in underground stations.
In late autumn 1988 the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, who emigrated to the Rhineland, mounted a series of five meter high photo prints with children's faces along a one hundred meter long wall between the cathedral of Cologne and the Museum Ludwig. He called the work Selection (Ninth November Night). It is a work of monstrous expression and painful effect. His title recalls the anniversary of the so-called Reichskristallnacht, through which Helnwein gives the children's portraits their almost overwhelmingly harrowing effect.
As we were preparing his exhibition for the Lentos Art Museum together with Gottfried Helnwein, I was researching at the same time for a different project about Kokoschka. The story of the London posters was new to me. Unintentionally and unexpectedly the two artist lives blended into one another for a brief poignant moment. With a tremendous creative effort, ability to communicate, organizational experience, implementation energy and financial resources, both artists devoted themselves on a specific occasion to an appeal: Remember! ...

Of course, the current studies on the face already rely less on effect-seeking, expressive drasticness. Rather, Gottfried Helnwein masks a possible mental turmoil or traumatization of his picture models, which might be suggested, for example, by the black, seemingly fascistoid and fetishized uniform parts, behind the posed expression of his children's faces. Like Laocoon, these "beautiful" children that seem as though carved from wax, no longer cry out. They bear something that is not named and yet is visible. In their intimacy, they communicate an unfathomable inscrutability. The viewer's irritation arises from not being able to find a clue to this mystery. The wound is to be kept open and no one should be allowed to heal it. ...

"She is not as old as she seems, though age, at least in her case, is an elusive notion. In fact, it is her childhood that is fixated, and not out of nostalgia. True, it would take a daring leap of imagination to connect pudgy little hands to the body as it is now, or to visualize the dimples and the baby teeth. The little-girl-who-once-was thought: Maybe I am really dead. Because only dead people get pushed so deep down".
(From: And the Rat Laughed, by Nava Semel).
Helnwein is a great believer in the ability of art to pass emotional memory on, as a reminder of the past or mainly as a warning of what the future might hold, for humanity, as far as he is concerned, has not learnt its lesson. Is there atonement in his artistic endeavors? I prefer the Jewish concept of - tikkun, purification of the soul. It has a deeper meaning than the physical healing of scars, for it elevates us to the highest sphere of the spirit. The wounded girls close their eyes, but they are not blind. Behind their closed lids their gaze is clear and penetrating. ...

The production of the Disney studios quickly attracted artists, especially from the movie world. Eisenstein and Prokofiev, when they were working on Ivan the Terrible (1945), took an interest in the work of Disney and the conductor Léopold Stokowski on Fantasia. By the mid-sixties Disney enjoyed immense, universal popularity. Since the release of Snow White in 1937, several generations have been raised on his films and have not forgotten them. Pop Art made Mickey and Donald into icons.
As the French painter Robert Combas put it in 1977: “Mickey is no longer Walt’s property, he belongs to us all”. After drawing on Western art from all periods, Disney’s world became in its turn a source of inspiration for artists as diverse as Christian Boltanski, Gottfried Helnwein, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Bertrand Lavier, Peter Saul and Gary Baseman. ...

For the past twenty-four years the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy Foundation, in association with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, has presented a series of film programs featuring the outstanding documentaries of the previous year.
The film, NINTH NOVEMBER NIGHT, was considered by the Academy’s Documentary Screening Committee to be one of the outstanding documentaries of 2004. It is our wish to include a screening of "Ninth November Night" in this prestigious series on the evening of Wednesday, November 30, 2005. ...