Helnwein
by Mic Moroney
...This unease with, and yet celebration of German-language cutlure continues to inform Helnwein's work, not least in this large piece, "The Silent Glow of the Avant Garde"
Helnwein's painting - both cheekily and totally in homage - appropriates the great paintings, "The Polar Sea" (1824) by the leading German Romantic landscape artist Casper David Friedrich. Helnwein here re-renders the painting in a gloomy, cinematic blue-black duochrome, and hugely magnifies it from its original scale (about 1 metre by 1 metre 30), although the foundered ship still seems dwarfed and pulverised by the splintering ice sheets. It remains a fine example of that particularly Germanic celebration of heroic humanity dashing itself against the majestic cruelty of nature.
Helnwein, in his wry title and borrowing of the image, is suggesting an uncomfortable paradigm behind Friedrich's painting - a perpetual sense of momentous revolution within nature, raw humanity and indeed artistic culture. These ideas pervaded Friedrich's work, as well as that of composer Richard Wagner and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche - all of whose works were later so mistakenly absorbed into the "superhuman" aesthetic of Nazi ideaology and doctrine... ...

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»Call Me Burroughs« ist eine Wanderausstellung für die reale Welt. Die Schau versammelt Fotos von Burroughs und seinen Freunden von allen Etappen des Burroughs' schen Lebenswegs - der Kindheit im St. Louis der späten 1910er Jahre, dem Alter in Lawrence, Kansas und den dazwischenliegenden Stationen New York City, Mexico City, Tanger, Paris, London etc. Produziert wurde die Ausstellung aus Anlaß von Burroughs 80. Geburtstag im Jahr 1994. Ihre Exponate stammen aus circa 50 Archiven und Sammlungen der Vereinigten Staaten und diversen Ländern Europas. ...

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group show ...

group show ...

Gottfried Helnwein, John Lennon, 1994
oil and acrylic on canvas,
courtesy Modernism, San Francisco ...

group show
Gottfried Helnwein, Thomas Struth, Marie-Lo Lafontaine, Nan Goldin, Vanessa Beecroft, Sean Scully and others
Exhibition catalogue:
Catalogue German / English with contributions by Gabriele Bösch,
Christine Frisinghelli, Rainer Igla / Michael Mauracher,
Edelbert Köb, Lois Renner and Eva Schlegel
The exhibition includes around 85 works from the collection's holdings
and several loans, selected by Gabriele Bösch from the perspective of photo/art. Many of the photographic works owned by the collection are now showcased for the first time and put into a traditional painting context,
thereby inviting an exciting discourse between painting and photography.
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