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The exhibition Angels Sleeping is a thematic cross-section, predominantly of the painting work of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. The five sections of the exhibition present the fundamental circuits of Helnwein’s work. The introduction comprises heads – faces, including the artist’s iconic self-portrait, painfully acute metaphors of the limits on freedom of expression in Austria in the 1970s and 80s. The artist’s merciless approach to the residues of the Nazi past of his country is a further theme, developed in monochrome, hyperrealistic painting. The central and still extremely relevant theme of Helnwein’s work however is das malträtierte Kind, the child exposed to suffering. The author engages with this theme in various positions from his early works from the 1970s up to the present day. His collection of works on this theme is given the largest space. Violence committed against children, in contrast with their passive exposure, distressed astonishment and impossibility of defending themselves against the world of adults is partially shifted into a further position, ironically entitled Art in Amerika. This presents the relationships of the white, frequently uniformed “majority” to other ethnic groups and minorities, particularly in the United States, sharpened by the photographic precision of the images. ...

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Chargesheimer, Claude Fauville, Bettina Gruber, David Hockney, Jürgen Klauke,
Floris M. Neusüss, Herbert Döring-Spengler,Gottfried Helnwein, u.a. ...

Various themes and concerns are explored by the artists including gender, social, and ethnic identity perception of the self (Su-en Wong); distortions of scale (Eisenman and Philips); use of cartoon or highly stylized imagery (Wesley, Ali, Fujita, Ofili); utilizing the superhero image (Warhol and Ramos); revisiting the Surreal figure (Tyson, Dingle, Quinn, Gormley); composite images of fictional characters (Kauper, Yuskavage, Currin, Lijun, Schütte); emotionally charged faces and forms (Flannigan, Gottfried Helnwein); a twisted notion of reality that reflects a dark world view (McLane, Middlebrook); images of the human form moving through time and space (Herring, Nauman); and the spirit of Neo-expressionism (Clemente, Brown). ...

Helnwein was deeply influenced by the Holocaust, as well as by popular cultural references like comics and rock music. His imagery is unsettling, dark, and deeply compelling, carrying powerful messages of political disturbance and social unease. ...

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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). ...

Masterpieces from the Essl Collection and Bank Austria Collection ...