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PRESS
helnwein
NEWS
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PRESS
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International Press
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English Press
15/10/2013
Albertina Museum
Vienna
250 000 Visitors Saw the Helnwein-Retrospective at the Albertina Museum
The Reviews
The Helnwein retrospective was the most successful exhibition of a living artist in the history of the Albertina.
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01/12/2004
Palace of the Legion of Honor
San Francisco Fine Arts Museums
'The Child' Exhibition - 130,000 VISITORS- The reviews
Summary of reviews and texts
Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor (of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums), deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers. But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes. Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 17. November 2004
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26/12/2004
San Francisco Chronicle
Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
CRITICS CHOICES 2004 - Helnwein
Steven Winn
Arts and culture
TOP 10 The Gottfried Helnwein exhibition "The Child" at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, July) was chosen as the most important show of a contemporary artist in 2004. "In the first of two shows (the other at the Modernism Gallery in November), Helnwein's large format, photo-realist images of children of various demeanors boldly probed the subconscious. Innocence, sexuality, victimization and haunting self-possession surge and flicker in Helnwein's unnerving work."
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24/01/2017
Los Angeles Review of Books
Confronting the Intolerable
Brad Evans interviews Gottfried Helnwein
Throughout the entire history, the only forces capable of resisting tyranny and suppression are artists, thinkers, and writers. These are the makers of what we call culture, which means the combination of aesthetics and spirituality. Dictators know that, they have a very good sense for the only serious threat to their power: free creation and free communication. On this planet, creating means to stand up, to rebel, to resist, it means striking back.
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26/10/2023
France 24
'No limit' to hell people can inflict on children, says artist Helnwein
Vienna (AFP) – Art is "probably the only help one has to cope" in a world being traumatised by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, one of Austria's most famous artists told AFP.
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03/01/2021
The Free Lunch Commission
Conformity is no Place for me
The Entropy Memo
Any belief system will pre-condition you to see only things that you are supposed to see, but it will make you blind to anything you are not allowed to perceive, even if it happens right in front of you. Through various education systems in all history, people have been convinced to abandon their own values and dreams and have been programmed to think and behave in certain ways. So people have developed a good workable system of selective perception. But there are always those that can’t be broken and properly programmed: artists, writers and thinkers. Nothing scares authoritarian regimes more than art and free creation. Why would Hitler burn mountains of books and paintings and ban all arts? Why would Stalin—the master over life and death of almost 300 million people, a man who commanded the biggest army and secret service that ever existed—be afraid of a poem by Anna Akhmatova? Why would Mao be so obsessed with destroying China’s entire cultural heritage? Why would FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, while denying the existence of organised crime in the US, put so much effort into harassing and spying on every artist from Hemingway, Elvis, Thomas Mann to John Lennon? The last thing any human society wants are free beings. Don’t wait for somebody to grant you freedom, it will never happen; if you want freedom, you have to seize it. Creating art is one way of doing it, and for me it’s the most effective way. On this planet, creating means to stand up, to rebel, to resist. It means striking back.
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14/11/1983
Time
John F. Kennedy - Helnwein cover for Time Magazine
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1983
Bijutsu Techo, Japan
Art magazine
Gottfried Helnwein
cover-story
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01/03/2005
ARTnews
Volume 104/Number 3
REVIEW: Gottfried Helnwein, San Francisco
Kenneth Baker
A highly satisfying survey of his work at the Legion of Honor museum titled "The Child" was dominated by images of children, as was a current exhibition of his more recent work at Modernism.
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28/12/2012
Forbes
The True Impact of Violence On Childhood? Why Every American Ought To See The Paintings Of Gottfried Helnwein.
Jonathon Keats
Two days after the Sandy Hook school massacre, a survival gear company called Black Dragon Tactical composed a new slogan to promote sales of armored backpack inserts. “Arm the teachers,” the company declared on Facebook. “In the meantime, bulletproof the kids.”... The question may be political, but the keenest response is to be found in a museum in Mexico City, the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, at a retrospective of paintings and photographs by the Austrian-American artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein’s extraordinary work depicts the fragile innocence of children. Devoid of grown-up sentimentalism, his images can be overwhelming, especially those that show how that innocence falters in an adult world.
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14/09/2008
The Sunday Times
Culture
Bloodied but Unbowed
Gerry McCarthy
Fury greeted Gottfried Helnwein's Waterford Installation, but his art deals in public trauma, says Gerry McCarthy
Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Christian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think." Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is still infused with an uneasy idealism. His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a veteran rock star and the lifestyle to match it.
mehr
02/10/2014
CNN
Astonishing photo-realistic portraits
Ones to Watch
The images you are about to see may shock or confound you. Gottfried Helnwein frequently depicts children in his gigantic, mesmerizing portraits, along with "low culture" icons including Donald Duck, with the loss of childhood innocence as a reoccurring theme.
mehr
30/05/2008
Los Angeles Times
Arts & Culture
Gottfried Helnwein - Dark Inspiration
Lynell George
The artist, who has taken on war crimes, Catholicism and the Holocaust in his works, is inspired by the city.
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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01/07/2021
Hot Press
Ireland
Gottfried Helnwein: “The Roman Catholic Church is the most powerful propaganda machine in history.”
Stuart Clark
Whether hanging with the Stones, zooming in on Warhol or making sure Dietrich wasn’t completely alone, Gottfried Helnwein has always ended up making great art. Stuart Clark tracks him down to his Waterford castle where Nazi Germany, Israel, Lou Reed, Marilyn Mansion, cancel culture, Donald Duck and Elvis are also up for discussion.
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02/12/2014
The New York Times
The Real-Life Addams Family
By Nicholas Haramis
They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky. They’re altogether ooky. Meet the Helnweins.
February rains flooded the gravel road to Gurteen Castle, a 40-room fortress built in 1866 for Pope Pius IX’s chamberlain. Throughout the Republic of Ireland, stories about power outages dominated the evening news, but the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein and his wife, Renate, their four children and three of their grandchildren were oblivious to the storm. In the castle’s dining room, under the flickering glow of candlelight, they were singing along to a spirited rendition of “Nell Flaherty’s Drake,” a bouncy 19th-century Irish folk song that had them merrily rhyming “astray” and “gray.”
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10/04/2006
New Statesman, UK
Nazi dreaming
Julia Pascal
"Face it" Helnwein exhibition at Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz
Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin. Of all his paintings, the most disturbing is Epiphany (1996), for which he dips into our collective memory of Christianity's most famous birth. This Austrian Catholic Nativity scene has no magi bearing gifts. Madonna and child are encircled by five respectful Waffen SS officers palpably in awe of the idealised, kitsch-blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on Mary's lap, stares defiantly out of the canvas. Helnwein's baby Jesus is Adolf Hitler.
mehr
05/08/2001
The Sunday Times
Cover story
SHOCK ART
Medb Ruane
Ireland
The disturbing Work of Helnwein comes to Ireland Helnwein is a headline artist who works in tight sound bites on a very large scale. The works brand themselves with proof of his technical know-how in various media and are endorsed by the coolest celebrities of his generation. So much for the cover-story, so what lies within? Headlines lure you into stories that make you want to cry, smile or help to change the world. But when they stop at your own skin, you can get a sinking feeling, a sense of the bigness and badness outside and the impossibility of change.
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07/07/2013
ARTFORUM
Gottfried Helnwein at the Albertina
Andrea Gyorody
In the artist’s most recent monumentally scaled paintings, the little girl persists, though she has morphed into a variety of cartoonish, disturbing archetypes— an anime character, a gun-toting outlaw—that appear alongside other portraits: a sinister-looking Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, for example. The all-too-frequent stories in the US media of accidental child deaths from gunshots give the exhibition’s final works, despite their apparent surrealism, an unnerving resonance.
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02/12/2014
New York Times
Culture
The Helnweins Will See You Now
Nicholas Haramis
They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky. Meet the Helnweins.
February rains flooded the gravel road to Gurteen Castle, a 40-room fortress built in 1866 for Pope Pius IX’s chamberlain. Throughout the Republic of Ireland, stories about power outages dominated the evening news, but the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein and his wife, Renate, their four children and three of their grandchildren were oblivious to the storm. Gottfried, in a skull-print bandanna and black sunglasses, spoke about the spirit of a jealous woman who tormented the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese on her wedding day (she married Gottfried’s friend Marilyn Manson there in 2005 in a ceremony officiated by the surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky). Von Teese was nearly ready to walk down the aisle when the ceiling above her vanity came crashing down, narrowly missing her and her maid of honor.
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01/11/2000
Artweek
Celebrating 30 Years
'The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection' at SFMOMA
Alicia Miller
Reviews
In 'The Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous. Much of the work has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child's world are rent with something untoward. For children, not understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape. Perhaps nothing in the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein's 'Mickey'. His portrait of Disney's favotite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer. This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed. Helnwein's Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless. But Mickey's terrifying demeanor hints of things to come.
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