" Helnwein is the next generation’s final ally, a skilled provocateur forcing us to confront the legacy we have bequeathed upon our children. Helnwein is our chronicler, our conscience, the antidote to our failing memories. He refuses to let us forget."

"Technische Meisterschaft und auch die Konsequenz einer packenden sozialkritischen Thematik offenbaren sich in dieser Ausstellung (Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz, 2006): Gewalt, Schmerz, Verletzung werden dargestellt. Den Körper ebenso wie die Psyche betreffend. Helnwein dokumentiert hier einen künstlerischen Reifegrad, der eine weitere Steigerung kaum vorstellbar macht. Seine Eingriffe sind von einer schmerzhaften Unmittelbarkeit, deren emotionale Energie weit über die großen Bildformate hinaus den Raum und sein Publikum ergreift."

"..Wir wenden aber immer wieder den Blick ab von seinen Kindern. dabei sind sie die verstörendsten Bilder des Malers Gottfried Helnwein: von den in süssen Farben gepinselten Aquarelle der frühen 70er Jahre, die meist geschändete, brutalisierte Mädchen zeigen - bis hin zu den überlebensgrossen, fotorealistischen Installationen der letzten Jahre, in denen er einer erstarrten Erwachsenenwelt den Spiegel ihrer verschütteten Kindheit vorhält. Bei Helnwein werden Wunden zu Waffen. Von Anbeginn an sind die Bilder des in Wien geprägten, und heute in Amerika arbeitenden Malers von Protesten und Skandalen begleitet gewesen, was Helnwein nicht überrascht, doch: " Es ist nicht mein Bild, vor dem sich die Leute fürchten, sondern ihre eigenen Bilder in ihren Köpfen."

"An artist with conscience, a fearless man with a penchant for profoundly bizarre and complex, meaningful images, Gottfried Helnwein is making a grand re-entry to San Francisco. His work was exhibited here four years ago when his freaky mixed-media portrait of Mickey Mouse - "Mouse I" - was part of the SF Museum of Modern Art's "The Darker Side of Playland - Childhood Imagery."
The paintings are extraordinary, grotesque, powerful, "difficult" and challenging, according to the curator of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums) exhibit, Robert Flynn Johnson.
They are all that, and more. A simple description of the works, without context, would only indicate a freak show: a photo-like painting of Hitler with two very Aryan-looking children, an actual bar of soap encased under them; a group of uniformed Nazis gazing adoringly on a contemporary Mother and Child (Helnwein explaining that the people in the photograph that was the basis for the painting were actually surrounding Hitler); images of normal children mixed with misshapen, ill, tortured youngsters. "Why would people cause so much pain to others?" Helnwein asks, and he shows the pain, unflinchingly, but not to titillate the demented or to horrify the ignorant.
"The Child" (exhibition) - located in a part of the Legion next to a permanent exhibit of Renaissance Mother and Child images by Pontormo, Tintoretto, Raphael, and others - has far more to offer than politics, morality, controversy and horror. Although there is no doubt that primarily Helnwein is "the artist as provocateur," he is also an artist in the sense of creating unique and lasting images."

"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."

"Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. Like Wong from Asia and Cindy Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation.
The child’s face – painted in a realistic style yet eerily unreal – may allude to the uncertain (in limbo-like) quality of Helnwein’s own childhood. Helnwein is among a network of contemporary artists expressing visions that embrace and also transcend cultural nomenclature. "

"Gottfried Helnwein's self-portraits in his "Black Mirror" series reach far beyond the boundaries of the ordinary self-portrait. They reflect the inner wants and desperation which lies within the viewer's own self. Helnwein points out the new form of the modern self-portrait which involves the creator and viewer alike."

"The Viennese Helnwein is part of a tradition going back to the 18th century, to which Messerschmidt's grimacing sculptures also belong, on which one of Freud's pupils wrote a long treatise.
One sees, too, the common ground of these works with those of Arnulf Rainer or Nitsch, two other Viennese, who display their own bodies in the frame of reference of injury, pain, and death. One can also see this fascination for body language goes back to the expressive gesture in the work of Egon Schiele."

"It is hard to deny, that the aggression- and vulnerability-symbolism of Helnwein's well-known and multiple-varied selfportrait of a bandaged head, eyes blinded by surgical forks and mouth opened wide to form a scream; is something of a self-evident metaphor for an elementary human stipulation of today's existence."

"Helnwein will most certainly attain an appropriate place within the lively history of Austrian art and scandal, which includes the works of Schiele, Gerstl, Schoenberg and others, as well as, the "Viennese Action group"