The Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein is well aware of the discomfort the public feels when confronted with images of children not represented as innocents but to whom a powerful sexual identity (and an awareness) is designated. In his work, and especially his paper drawings, he has created some of the most powerful and disturbing representations of abused childhood in history of art. We are not talking about the form of abuse commonly described in the penal code. By altering or removing the inbred pulsation that spurs us to stubbornly refuse or deny what we do not recognise, the manipulations and interferences (The Intrusion) adults perform on the social body of childhood are denounced. ...

Gottfried Helnwein's extensive 1997 retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg gave visitors an overview of his work going back to his street actions in Vienna in the 1970s, his grimacing iconic self-portraits that suggest self-mutilation, and on to his menacing canvases depicting the evils of the Third Reich.
He has worked as a painter. draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor and performance artist. His work is consistently concerned with psychological anxiety.
In his new series of paintings, done in somber monochrome blues, he continues to work with singulae sense of suspense and mystery. ...

...To this day, there is still controversy over when to operate on these fixed nasal deformities acquired during midfacial growth. The painting by Helnwein, entitled "Mean Child", depicts a terrified child who has just undergone a reconstructive operation to form a new nose from a frontal flap (Fig. 46). Blood drips from the tubes projecting from the reconstructed nose. A purulent scrap of granulation is seen in the left medial canthus, while a fresh scar from which the sutures have just been removed stretches from the angle of the mouth to the left ear. The flowered wallpaper in the background contains these words: disobedience allowed, taking pleasure in punishments, unchaste things, and other words which are connected with lines to the pathological alterations in the face. Do these harken back to the mediaeval belief that sickness is a punishment for greater or lesser human failings?

Artists:
George Grosz, Gottfried Helnwein, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, William Hogarth, Otto Dix, Velásques, Hans Holbein the Younger, Bernard van Orley, Vrubel, Jacob Jordaens, Juan Carreno de Miranda, George Catlin, Jan Provoost, Honoré Daumier , Heinrich Zille, Wilhelm Busch, , Gaetano Guilio Zumbo, Manfred Deix, Simone Martini, Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Marc Chagall, Chicotot, Laurence Sterne, Utamaro, Ferdinand Bol, Master of the Wenemaer Triptych, Liberale da Verona, Jules Lenepveu, Alexandrowitsch Wssjewoloshskij, and Ancient Egypt-, Phoenician-, Roman-, Greek- and Mayan -artists.
...

Art Direction: Gottfried Helnwein
Editing and primary director of photography:
Benjamin at the Barbarian Group
Second camera: Charles Koutris
Location: studio Helnwein, Los Angeles ...

Mag in der Insistenz und Extensität der Produktion Rainers Werk herausragen, die Abwendung von der Anthropologie, die als Negation doch auch mit ihr verknüpft ist, durchzieht die Kunst seit der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zum Bestand der kanonisierten Kunst gehören mittlerweile die fotografisch dokumentierten Body-Perfomances der 60er und 70er Jahre (z.B. Bruce Naumann, Jürgen Klauke, Klaus Rinke), die Selbstporträts Gottfried Helnweins der 70er und 80er Jahre, die Video-Dummies von Tony Oursler. ...

This was the moment when I sensed for the first time," Helnwein has since written, "[that] you can change something with aesthetics, you can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the powerful and strong to slide and totter, anything actually if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means." For the following three-and-a-half decades he has relentlessly pursued that goal, masterfully incorporating everything from painting to performance to photography, regularly causing art world outcry and public fury. Yet as his knockout exhibition at Modernism last October made clear, his art is successful less for its evident tendency to provoke than for its extraordinary ability to perplex. ...

Austrian born artist Gottfried Helnwein's work is also of exemplary value, beginning with bandage action events (documented by the artist appearing in cafe's and lying in the street with his "wounded" head and face bandaged). His work depicts physical injuries which are metaphors for far deeper existential, psychological and human tragedies. Medical injuries, facial deformities and abused children proliferate throughout his work evoking primary internal anxieties. The inhumane acts of violence (child abuse, war atrocities, state oppression) and frightening images of familial estrangement that are presented in his work, constitute events which are preferred forgotten, like the nazi era, or preferred left unspoken such as familial traumas like child abuse. Helnwein also conducts a probing analysis of the individual and the self through an abundance of self portraits, each obscured by hideous facial bandages, his facial muscles, lips and eyes are stretched apart, torturingly, by varied medical instruments, now made famous by the Rammstein covers. All his images in some way evoke associations with mutilation, anguish or internal alienation. The works (frequently paintings appearing remarkably like photographs), boldly put forward social unacceptabilities never before portrayed so lucidly and so confrontingly. The many intensities produced in the work are profoundly disturbing, the impressions - uncomfortably eerie, electrocuting the eyes with a rush of haunting spatiality. ...

Any artist who sites Donald Duck and Jesus Christ as the most important influences in their art must be worth taking a look at.
In the row of pristine gallery fronts in London's Cork street, you cannot miss Gottfried Helnwein's show; it's the one with the gigantic Mickey Mouse staring out at you.
The Robert Sandelson Gallery has given us a stunning show of the infamous, Austrian born artist's recent work. Helnwein is on a mission to find the answers to questions that no-one in Austria would give him; such as why the post-war republic portrayed itself as a victim rather than as one of the first main perpetrators of Nazism. ...

These paintings are about America, I guess from a very European point of view.
They're based on photographs, mainly newspaper photographs, of the Fifties and Sixties from archives in New York and L.A. Most people in these pictures are real people, caught in some long forgotten, petty events.
I rearranged the scenes, introduced new characters, and created new relationships and contexts. And then I painted them in black and blue.
That's how I remember America back then in the early Fifties in Vienna, where I was born. The big war had ended a few years ago, but the city still seemed undecided as to whether this was the end of the world or if life should go on.
It was a strange, sad and surreal world. The streets were empty, the houses dark - many of them in ruins from the bombings.
The few people I saw seemed ugly, clumsy, and depressed.
I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard anybody sing. It was a world without sound and colour. Everything moved in slow motion, like slime. We had no phones, no television, no cars, no music, no pictures, except the paintings of tortured people in the Roman Catholic church which made a deep impression on me, haunting me in the sleepless nights of my childhood limbo.
And then, without any warning, suddenly there was America.
When I saw the first picture of Elvis I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.
That was the beginning of the never-ending flood of American images that suddenly came over us and started to penetrate and transform everything. ...

Gottfried Helnwein, der Künstler als Agressor und vermaledeiter Moralist, S. 10-19, in: Helnwein, Arbeiten von 1970-1985, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Wien, 3.4.-5.5.1985, Wien 1985. ...

Project Arts Centre ...

The Choice, is an exhibition that identified unknown and emerging artists through the viewpoint of leading contemporary artists. We invited an international group of artists to engage their own curatorial ideas. In the role of curator, these artists had been asked to present the work of artists they have followed or whose work has affected them in a personal way.
Curator/Artists
Ida Applebroog: Jane Higgins, Saeri Kiritani, Lisa Petsu Lagunes
Nicole Eisenman: Alison Kelly, Maria E. Piñeres, Suzanne Wright
Robert Gober: Jonathon Hexner
Antony Gormley: Ignassi Aballi, John Patrick Clayman
Gottfried Helnwein: Iris Andraschek, Danielle Kraay
Damien Hirst: Rachel Howard
Ronald Jones: Eric Schnell
Frank Moore: Aaron Cobbett, Michael Combs
Cindy Sherman: Charles Clough, Susan Jennings, David Krueger, Gail Le Boff
Laurie Simmons: Helen Rousakis, Pedro Barbeito
Kiki Smith: Joey Kötting
Sam Taylor-Wood: Georgie Hopton
Nari Ward: Brett Cook Dizney, Chris Sollars ...

Gottfried Helnwein's artistic and intellectual approach is to aim quite subtly at producing a crucial feeling of insecurity and a concomitant change of consciousness in the viewer, by using seemingly familiar or usual images that have a certain amount of tradition and an apparently well known composition. ...

Barks:
... I preferred to work with the duck - I could push Donald around, let him get into an accident, I could let him fall off a cliff, or whatever I wanted. It was lots of fun with Donald. With Mickey that would have been dangerous, because he always had to be loved and had to be victorious in all situations. With Donald I had a comedian who I could treat badly and who I could make fun of. ...

Nach 1945 trumpft die Kunst umfänglich erst wieder mit der 68er Bewegung schockierend auf. Etwa in der Pop-Art. Etwa mit den Bildtafeln eines Roy Lichtensteins. Seine Arbeiten, wie auch die anderer Pop-Artisten, tendieren indes zu einer Ästhetisierung des Schreckens. Zitatförmig nimmt Lichtenstein etwa Comic-Motive vom Krieg auf. Doch die Darstellung oszilliert zwischen Wohlgefallen an der Szenerie und Kritik an der Szenerie. Ähnlich ambivalent erscheinen die zahlreichen Drucke von Andy Warhol zum Thema "Kennedy-Mord".
Der wirkliche Schrei, Signum einer Vorkriegsepoche, taucht nicht mehr auf. Ausnahme von der Regel sind die Werke von Gottfried Helnwein. Sie zielen nochmals auf die Scham- und Peinlichkeitsschwelle. Oder sie machen aus dem täglichen Schrecken im Fernsehen ein formatfüllendes Standbild, ("Das Wunder I", 1980, "Das Lied I", 1981). ...

Looking at Gottfried Helnwein' portraits, we once again experience the shock of the new, of an unprecedented view of the person opposite. I have observed many people confronted with these portraits for the first time and again and again they would show surprise, intensity of experience and fascination. Helnwein's portraits can be seen as counterpoles to the technically sophisticated smoothnes of the portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe. ...

Am 31.5 und 1. 6. 1989 trafen sich Heiner Müller, Hans Kresnik, Gottfried Helnwein und Ismael Ivo in Helnweins Atelier auf Schloss Burgbrohl um gemeinsam ein Theaterstück über Antonin Artaud zu erarbeiten. Das Stück ist nie realisiert worden, die Arbeitsnotizen sind in Teilen erhalten.
Für die Struktur des Stückes sollten drei bis fünf Motive über Artaud als Variationen erscheinen wie bei einer Komposition. Heiner Müller sagt, er könne am besten nach Bildern schreiben. Er schlägt vor: Helnwein solle alle erdenklichen Variationen zu dem Thema zeichnen und malen, die als Inspiratione dienen sollen, und auf deren Grundlage Kresnik die Choreographie erarbeiten soll. ...

Das einzige, das von meiner Schulbildung geblieben ist, - das Schreiben und das Rechnen, habe ich in der Volksschule gelernt, bei den katholischen Schulbrüdern - ganz ohne moderne Pädagogik.
Dort habe ich sogar im Zeichnen etwas gelernt. Im Religionsunterricht haben wir Herzen gezeichnet - mit Flügeln und schwarzen Flecken, die in den Beichtstuhl hineinfahren und auf der anderen Seite wieder weiß herauskommen.
Das ist doch phantastisch!
Oder - "das Auge Gottes"! Damals hat jeder in unserer Klasse gezeichnet wie der Günther Brus. Danach auf dem Gymnasium war alles Scheiße. Im Englischunterricht mußten wir 4 Seiten aus "Ann and Pat" auswendig lernen und in Bildnerischer Erziehung eine Wunderblume zeichnen.
Ich hasse aber Wunderblumen, und so habe ich Donald Duck als Kapitän gezeichnet, wie er gerade Tick, Trick und Track anschreit.
Worauf mein "Zeichenprofessor" meine Eltern vorgeladen hat, um ihnen mitzuteilen, wie gefährlich es sei, Witzhefte nachzuzeichnen.
Damit hatte er jedoch nicht recht, denn die einzigen Lehrer, von denen ich wirklich etwas gelernt habe - nicht nur künstlerisch, sondern auch philosophisch, also für's ganze Leben sozusagen, - waren Walt Disney, Carl Barks und Donald Duck.
Sie waren immer für mich da, und wenn ich das Gefühl hatte, niemand versteht mich, sie haben mich immer verstanden. Und wenn ich traurig war und einsam, sie haben mich wieder aufgerichtet und mir wieder Mut gemacht,
und gemeinsam mit Tick, Trick und Track habe ich dann gesungen: "Wir pfeifen auf Pomade, auf Seife, Kamm und Schwamm, wir bleiben lieber dreckig und waelzen uns im Schlamm!" ...

Verwunderlich wäre es, doch nicht mehr undenkbar, wenn eines fernen Tages, aus der Anderen Zeit heraus, das deutsche Dritte Reich nicht mehr vornehmlich nach seinem blutigen Formgefühl beurteilt würde, mit dem es die Schrecken der Diffusioo im ersten Massenzeitalter beseitigte, sondern vielmehr erinnert würde als das erste, alles in die Verirrung treibende Beben, als der Erste Ruck vor dem langsam gewaltigen Aufbruch in eine "geschichtslose" statische Epoche. ...

Crying for the moon... immer hast du ihn haben wollen. Zuerst einfach so, als blanke Münze, konvertierbar in deine samtfarbenen Zwangssehnsüchte, als Kleingeld für die Überfahrt in die von den Emigranten der Nacht gelobten Länder, als leuchtender Kiesel - Wegweiser durch die Styxe des Amüsiergewerbes.
Den Mond wolltest du, weil du die Erde nicht in den Arm nehmen konntest, den Mond, weil sein Licht dir den Blick in die Höhe trieb, der der Sonne nur blinzelnd entgegenzwinkerte, den Mond, der für die meisten ein Gefühl ist, mit dem keiner weltmäßig leben kann.
Mondsüchtig wie Pierrot und doch den Gaffern zugewandt, deren Sympathie sich an deiner trauernden Weiße bricht. Der rote Punkt an deiner Nase ist das Stoppzeichen für all die Aberwitze, die dein Gegenspieler August dir ums Maul streicht. Natürlich bist du prächtig gekleidet und du weißt, was du deiner entrückten Seinsweise an lasziver Grandezza schuldig bist, um nicht nur ins Auge zu fallen, sondern darin zu bleiben, als zur Eisblume verwandelter Splitter, der Stachel der Sehnsucht nach einer Welt, aus der du zu uns kommen scheinst, die du aber nicht verkörperst. ...