Helnwein in the Rudolfinum Gallery The exhibition entitled “Angels Sleeping” introduces works by the Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein, whose oeuvre has become a phenomenon of hyperrealist painting. His canvases, executed in the manner of photographic preciseness, draw from pop-culture as well as history, and the artist’s great subject is the position of a child in an extreme situation. The exhibition is divided to five sections which present the main subjects of Helnwein’s work, at the same time laying emphasis on his paintings from the most recent years. The first section displays portraits of the artist’s bandaged face; the second section contains references to the Nazi past of Austria, while the central subject of the third and fourth sections is child. The last section presents photographs inspired by pop-culture. The group of exhibited works was loaned from the property of the artist as well as from many public and private collections from Europe and the United States ...

Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein conducts the commentary for a tour of his exhibition named "Angels Sleeping" at Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague Thursday, June 12, 2008. The exhibition deals with five circuits of his paintings: faces, violence committed against children, Nazism, "Art in America" and metaphorical portraits of the singer Marilyn Manson, seen in backgroud. ...

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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. ...

Some might think that Los Angeles - its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane." ...

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The drama of Amstetten throws the light on a crime that happens behind the facades of apparently respectable families. This painting of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein expresses the anguish of the child's soul. The artist, who lives in Ireland, called this watercolor fom the 70s "Song I".
Helnwein's whole work thematizes pain, injury and violence of and against children. ...

Amstetten between discomposure and media-hype: A dungeon amidst the town, a father inflicting martyrdom onto his children - how we struggle to put the pieces of the incomprehensible together.
The dungeon in Amstetten touches something deep inside the marrow of the Austrians, their dark side, mirrored in the poems of their authors and in the Images of Gottfried Helnwein, depicting people with forkes pusched into their eyes. Or Girls with blood running down their legs. Helnwein's paintings are nightmares, they tell of of the dungeons in our heads... ...

9 Gottfried Helnwein ...

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. ...

"Finally we are living now in a society that is a combination of what Huxley foresaw in his "Brave new World" and Orwell in his "1984". We are caught in a stream of constant propaganda and we are under total surveillance. This is the Age of materialism, consumerism and decadence. Our heroes are idiots like trash-princess Paris Hilton, in their sad 15 minutes of fame. Children are shooting other children in schools before they kill themselves and in other parts of the world they blow themselves up in the middle of crowds.
Doesn't that look like the end of a civilization, the second fall of Rome?" ...

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Nach "Das Rheingold/Die Walküre" im Opernhaus Bonn, folgt in der Spielzeit 2007/2008 "Siegfried/Die Götterdämmerung" als zweiter Teil. Bühne und Kostüme aller 4 Teile des "Ring des Nibelungen" sind von Gottfried Helnwein gestaltet. ...

Vicki and Kent Logan hosting a dinner at their home in honor of Gottfried Helnwein. ...

Without doubt I was under the spell of Gottfried Helnwein, the final speaker of the excellent DAM Contemporaries artist lecture series (December 13th, 2007). His incantation began before I had even heard him speak, after seeing his twisted photorealistic infant Hitler-Christ child and mother Mary interrogated by the Nazi SS (1996 "Epiphany, Adoration of the Magi," part of the Radar show earlier this year at the DAM.) The artist himself noted that "hardly any other painting created so much emotional response" as Epiphany I (he created 2 other works in the series). ...

In memory of Francisco de Goya ...

FIGURES OF DESIRE: fantasies of identification, disguises or transformations, social roles in construction of gender and sexuality. ...

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