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

14:00

The ceremony was held at the Nacional theatre and broadcast live on cable TV channel Canal (á).
Following are the winners in the different categories:
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Best actress in a fringe show: Belén Blanco for "Kleines Helnwein" ...

In 1969 Helnwein painted a portrait of Adolf Hitler and was expelled from the art school on the grounds that any remainder of the National Socialist era was not only damaging to the school but to society at large. Repression of National Socialism had been official government policy, in which the Austrian people were complicit. Based on this situation, Helnwein developed a visual language of apocalyptic visions that can be understood all over the world. ...