Any artist who sites Donald Duck and Jesus Christ as the most important influences in their art must be worth taking a look at.
In the row of pristine gallery fronts in London's Cork street, you cannot miss Gottfried Helnwein's show; it's the one with the gigantic Mickey Mouse staring out at you.
The Robert Sandelson Gallery has given us a stunning show of the infamous, Austrian born artist's recent work. Helnwein is on a mission to find the answers to questions that no-one in Austria would give him; such as why the post-war republic portrayed itself as a victim rather than as one of the first main perpetrators of Nazism. ...

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. ...

These are the images of a man consumed by free will. A man with a gift and a craft and a passion to challenge the mediocrity of what has already been established. A man whose opinions embody everything authority does not want you to believe in. His name is Gottfried Helnwein, and he recently discussed his 30+ year career with Tastes Like Chicken's Insane Wayne Chingsang. ...

The Book Bukowski in Pictures is the first pictorial biography of cult writer, Charles Bukowski. The writer's extraordinary private and public life is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, most published for the first time. Extracts from Bukowski's poetry and prose are sprinkled throughout, together with drawings, cartoons, manuscripts, rare broadsides and personal letters. It features powerful new portraits of Bukowski by leading photographers such as Gottfried Helnwein and Tony Lane, former art director of Rolling Stone, as well as work by R.Crumb. All photographs have detailed captions by biographer Howard Sounes who has also written a powerful introductory text with new revelations gleaned from Bukowski's recently declassified FBI file. The end result is a fascinating life in pictures that will be essential for all Bukowski fans. ...

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HEY, there's Mickey Mouse at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art!
Wait a minute. That's not my perky little pal from ''Steamboat Willie.'' This Mickey looks a little mean. This Mickey looks like Michael Eisner's id. Nice Mickey. Don't hurt me. Here's a dollar.
That's how it goes at ''The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection,'' perhaps the first show to suggest that there are indeed monsters under the bed, and you might as well get used to it.
SFMOMA curatorial associate Heather Whitmore Jain struck the perfect note by opening the show with Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's massive and menacing oil and acrylic ''Mickey.''
It's hard to imagine another contemporary symbol so perfectly balanced between beloved childhood icon and its day job as a corporate logo. Helnwein chooses an earlier Mickey, with the smaller, darker eyes and the longer, more ratlike nose to help make his point. With his pasted-on smile and forward lunge, this Mickey looks more ready to negotiate cable and Web rights than to comfort a preschooler. ...

With ironic images of toys and cartoon figures, a number of contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors take incisive aim at the emotional underbelly of childhood in The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from September 1, 2000, through January 2, 2001. Explaining how these representations question deeply rooted social mores, this exhibition includes over 30 playful and wicked works-drawn from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan-by such contemporary artists as Gottfried Helnwein, David Levinthal, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Laurie Simmons and Hung Tung-lu. As Kent Logan states, "Of the themes in our collection this exhibition will explore what I like to call 'Children's Hour.'" ...

Austrian artist Gottfired Helnwein's powerful and haunting paintings provide a disturbing commentary on Nazism and the Holocaust, regularly provoking outraged reactions from right-wingers in his native land and in Germany. "I was amazed how much pictures could reach into the hearts and minds of people - and how much they would talk to me about it," he told the JC. "For me, art is like a dialogue. My art is not giving answers, it is asking questions." ...

Helnwein, the controversial Austrian artist whose works is currently on show at the Robert Sandelson gallery in London, has always been a difficult personality to pin down.
He chose to exhibit all three "Epiphany" paintings alongside a series of photographs of 19th century stillborn foetuses in an exhibition entitled "Apokalypse". Hung together in a Dominican church in Weinstadt in Austria, the final effect was one of haunting beauty, each child framed magnificently within the high vaulted ceiling of the church. The juxtaposition of these serene yet poignant images of "beings that never were" placed next to paintings that recalled the ideological terrors of the past, created a synthesis of values as politically dynamic as they were aesthetically entrancing. Yet throughout his career as an artist Helnwein has never ceased to use his work as a way to question his immediate surroundings. ...

A year or so back, an exhibition called Sensations caused a few upsets, first in London and then in New York. Central to the reaction was a large-scale portrait of a child-killer assembled from, if I remember correctly, the palm prints of children. So far, so bland. The shock element in art has been much talked about in the last five years but art that actually shocks has been thin on the ground during the same period.
Step forward then, Gottfried Helnwein.
By and large, if art is going to shock, it better have something shocking to say,and it's clear that Helnwein has found that. ...

A blonde Madonna, dressed as if she were spending an evening at the opera, presents her child to the watchful eyes of Nazi SS Guards, One officer looks as if he were studying the child's genitals, perhaps to see whether he has been circumcised. Dark hair parted severely to one side and fleshy baby cheeks lending a slight and comical hangdog expression, the young child presents something of an eerie resemblance to the Führer. ...

The 24-hour city is already a reality for art-lover Lou Reed.
Reed was dining with a friend - the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein - on Sunday night, when he decided he wanted to see Helnwein's new show at the Robert Sandelson Gallery.
"I had just taken to my bed when I got a phone call from Gottfried", says Sandelson. "But I'm an old fan of Lou Reed so I went as I was and opened up at midnight." For nearly an hour, Sandelson stood in his nightwear and "yawned away while they analysed the pictures in detail". ...

Kate Connolly meets Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian who is still confronting his country's Nazi past. It could have been worse. At least he doesn't look like his self-portraits, in which bandages swathe his head, bent forks pull his mouth into a mocking smile and blood drenches his torso. Helnwein, 52, is a master of the scandalous and the art of shocking. The artist Robert Crumb once said of him: "Helnwein is a very fine artist and one sick motherfucker." "You can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the strong and powerful to slide and totter - anything, actually, if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means." ...

Helnwein, who grew up in Austria just after the Second World War had, like many others of his generation living in Germany or Austria, found it hard to come to terms with the Nazi past. As with fellow German and Austrian artists Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Hermann Nitsch, there is a sense of being plagued by history in his work, even though he says that art should never be about ideology - "I don't want to teach and explain." ...

This made perfect sense, I thought, considering the visuals attached to their recent album Sehnsucht: portraits of the band by Gottfried Helnwein, the brilliant German artist whose gauze-wrapped and fork-embellished self-portrait had been an album cover for the Scorpions -- you know the one I'm talking about?
Helnwein had photographed the Rammstein faces after mangling and compromising them with arcane medical apparatus; and here I was, with my back mangled and compromised, being photographed by arcane medical apparatus! How very synchronistic it all was!
Why, Helnwein was probably out there right now, conducting the band in their concerted hammerstrikes, perhaps even forming a mini mosh pit with my wife or discussing the finer points of arcane medical apparatus-based face-mangling with the MRI tech! Of course! And there were streamers, too! Multicolored streamers that descended from the antiseptic rafters and twisted and shimmered like silken snakes dancing in time to the music ... ...

...

One piece of public art he did in 1988 - funded fully by himself, after he failed to raise sponsorship - commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. "Again, what amazed me was that nobody talked about it - and yet that was when the horror really started."

"I wanted to do it in front of the Dome in Cologne, but the City prevented it. But there was this little strip of land which belonged to the railways, and a guy who worked there said, 'go ahead'. I didn't want to use these historic photographs which are used too often - those mountains of corpses mean nothing anymore - so I used four metre high children's faces. I photographed children from the area, foreign children, German children, Jews, anything." Mounted in a long billboard line, after the huge word "Selection", the children's faces were powdered in a deathly, bruised way, many with their eyes closed. That may sound subtle, but in the context of muted German Holocaust memorials, it was like a slap in the face. Despite CCTV video-cameras, someone painstakingly sliced the throats of every single child-portrait. ...

These paintings are about America, I guess from a very European point of view.
They're based on photographs, mainly newspaper photographs, of the Fifties and Sixties from archives in New York and L.A. Most people in these pictures are real people, caught in some long forgotten, petty events.
I rearranged the scenes, introduced new characters, and created new relationships and contexts. And then I painted them in black and blue.
That's how I remember America back then in the early Fifties in Vienna, where I was born. The big war had ended a few years ago, but the city still seemed undecided as to whether this was the end of the world or if life should go on.
It was a strange, sad and surreal world. The streets were empty, the houses dark - many of them in ruins from the bombings.
The few people I saw seemed ugly, clumsy, and depressed.
I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard anybody sing. It was a world without sound and colour. Everything moved in slow motion, like slime. We had no phones, no television, no cars, no music, no pictures, except the paintings of tortured people in the Roman Catholic church which made a deep impression on me, haunting me in the sleepless nights of my childhood limbo.
And then, without any warning, suddenly there was America.
When I saw the first picture of Elvis I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.
That was the beginning of the never-ending flood of American images that suddenly came over us and started to penetrate and transform everything. ...

But stand all this beside an Antony Gormley cage figure (White Cube) or the giant paintings of stillborn babies by Gottfried Helnwein, an artist revered in Germany and Austria (Robert Sandelson). ...

(Picture of Gottfried Helnwein's "Angel Sleeping")
Visitors to the Robert Sandelson Gallery in London get a taste of what art will look like in the future with Angel Sleeping (right), by Gottfrid Helnwein, and Double Date Series/ the Club (left), by Micha Klein Mark Chilvers