Meet GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN
and 'The Last Child' in our new Volume 5 of TRUCE Magazine.
An exclusive 34 page cover about this amazing artist and his current exhibition in Ireland,
might thrill you a bit. At bookstores and newsstands around December.
Are you ready for this? ...

The bride wore a flowing purple Vivienne Westwood number over her trademark cinched corset. Manson was his normal sepulchral white self, with black make-up and lipstick as they exchanged vows by candlelight in Ireland, at Gothic Castle Gurteen Le Poer in Kilsheelan, Co Tipperary.
A designer-fest costing an estimated $500,000, the bride wore Christian Louboutin shoes to trip up the aisle while the groom wore a John Galliano black-silk taffeta tux. They exchanged their vows at midnight in the home of their artist friend Gottfried Helnwein and the invited guest list was studded with showbiz royalty, including Madonna, Keanu Reeves, David Lynch, Lisa Marie Presley, and Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. ...

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. ...

WITH some of his "The Last Child" instal­lations reaching a massive 120ft, Austri­an born artist Gottfried Helnwein has been causing quite some controversy around Waterford City. ...

LARGE-scale art installations dotted around Waterford’s city centre depicting war images are causing controversy because of their graphic content.
The exhibition, The Last Child, by Austrian-born and Waterford-based artist Gottfried Helnwein, is part of the Waterford Fringe Festival and includes a variety of work placed at strategic locations in the city, such as the Quays, the Clock Tower, City Hall and John Roberts Square. Among the material featured in the images are depictions of children with guns and a child lying down, covered with blood, as well as various shots of children with their eyes closed, as if dead. ...

“For me, the reaction so far in Waterford is very good because people are talking about the theme of war and exploitation. For a child to grow up now, it’s the toughest time ever because children are flooded with violence in the media and internet and computer games where the only thing to do is kill people and they are very graphic. Entertainment is very violent but as long as it’s entertainment, it’s fine, but as soon as you do it as art, people get very sensitive. In my art I’m only reflecting the world and I wanted to raise awareness and make people think.” ...

"For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, has assembled a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein’s works and provided an insightful essay on his art in this exhibition catalogue.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses." ...

Clive Wilkinson's renovation of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, made him a design star. But the 53-year-old architect had never designed a house before he started on his own, in West Hollywood. ...

In the Republican Last Chance Saloon is a Norman Rockwell-style McCain, talking tough about Czechoslovakia, Iraq and jobs with blue-collar workers. (How early 1990s of him.) They paint Obama as a 1950s-style Gottfried Helnwein figure. But instead of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean in the diner, Obama sits alongside Paris and Britney. McCain gives new meaning to "Audacity Watch" with his sexually provocative, racially charged, dumbed-down subliminal ad campaign ...

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.
Tony Ozuna, The Prague Post, 02. July 2008 ...

It’s immediately obvious that Angels Sleeping is going to be both powerful and unsettling. The first picture that catches the eye, “Modern Sleep I” (Moderní spánek I), is of a young girl wearing only a man’s jacket that brings to mind a Nazi uniform. A tear is in the corner of her eye and she appears to be looking fixedly at some object outside the painting’s scope. The light on her sweet-looking face and flashes of bare skin gives a sense of vulnerability and innocence that combines uncomfortably with how she is dressed. It creates a sense of foreboding in any observer thinking about what circumstances could lead to her being dressed this way. This is just the beginning of images that bring the maltreatment of children to the forefront, in particular Helnwein’s merciless references his country’s Nazi past. ...

Waterford Fringe Festival will present a spectacular outdoor exhibition of Helnweins work in Sept of this year. The exhibition involves a series of his paintings screen printed to very large images and displayed on prominent Waterford city centre premises. ...

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. ...

What do Marilyn Manson, Mickey Mouse, violence against children and Nazism have in common? There may be a few ways to answer that question, but Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition, Angels Sleeping, brings these topics together most powerfully, and might expose a few feelings of anguish you never knew you had.
If you have yet to experience the hyper-realistic paintings of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, head to the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague at once. The art on offer spans his work from the 1970s up to the present day, split into five key sections that explore his most common themes of psychological and sociological suffering, with paintings so realistic you’ll question your own eyes. ...

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. ...

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." ...

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. ...

In February 2008 Kresnik presented the final production of his ensemble, based on Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle, in Berlin. Kresnik's Ring was created in collaboration with the painter and scenic designer Gottfried Helnwein, who expresses himself in his works of art just as politically as Kresnik. This is apparent with the poster to the production, which was also created by Helnwein: the head of an exhausted child lying in a pool of blood, overwhelmed by a heap of Euro coins. Kresnik and Helnwein argue on the topics power and money, force and war. ...

Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition I Walk Alone is pretty unnerving, and that is his point. Large-scale photo-realistic paintings confront the viewer like a series of film stills forming a bizarre and disturbing sequence of nightmares. Using digital photography and computer-generated images combined with classical painting techniques, many of the images are only black and white, while others use one additional color, such as red, to dramatic and horrifying effect.
The images might be seen as bits of individual stories, or pieced together in a variety of frightful ways, or seen as a generalized narrative of brutality and terror, in which innocence is perhaps relative. We are all implicated in Helnwein’s unfolding dramas. ...