"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?" ...

The city's essence feeds his dark, uneasy work, which tends toward violence and the grotesque: bandaged, broken children, scenes of torture, pooling blood, grimacing visages. What he creates, regardless of the medium — watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture — is a psychological excursion into the sublimated self, the obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are unflinching and surgical. ...

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Today, the body you were born with is no longer a “fixed” entity. In our appearance-obsessed society, people can change the physical contours of their bodies in a myriad of ways. Now, a bold new exhibition at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will explore the modern human form as it is imagined – by contemporary artists.
Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection is drawn from one of the most prominent private collections of international contemporary art in the United States. Many of the artists whose works Vicki (Vassar class of 1968) and Kent Logan have collected are known for depictions of the human form that explore issues of psychological identity, and that reinvent figuration as a conceptual tool. ...

I have seldom seen injustice presented so directly and so well as a subject of fine art. The work of Leon Golub comes to mind, whose extravagant visions of contemporary torture are so chilling, in part because they exhibit with beautiful painting the smiling indifference of the torturers. Gottfried Helnwein paints views of sadistic punishment with the care and precision of a latter-day Vermeer. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro photograph the Spanish Civil War with the emotional intensity of Goya. Goya himself, whose paintings and prints — in a book of his etchings entitled The Disasters of War, published posthumously in 1863 — depict so effectively the savagery of guerilla warfare. ...

“I did a fairly major restoration and paint job on the front, but to be honest, there wasn’t too much about the interior to get excited about,” says the London native, an avid modern-art collector. “The previous owner lived here for over 30 years. I had to strip away three layers of old wall coverings to expose the original brick”­—now hung with a museum-wing’s worth of photography by Todd Hido and Lucas’ ex-girlfriend Elena Dorfman, a haunting multimedia canvas by Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein called I Walk Alone and a humorous “wallpapered” self-portrait by local artist Tim Sullivan. “It was really dark and filthy,” recalls Lucas. “Now, it’s open and warm.” ...

Nicola Costantino creates a bleak operating room reminiscent of the French film Delicatessen. Maybe the Troglodist characters from the movie help in understanding Costantino's nod to Gottfried Helnwein? ...

Two generations of art provocateurs discuss tortured saints, world wars, and the unbearable lightness of being normal. ...

MARILYN Manson's unheated Californian pile features mounted baboon heads; a lithograph, Epiphany 1 (Adoration of the Magi) by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, depicting the baptism of a Nazi Christ (Helnwein also shot the cover of Manson's fifth album, The Golden Age of Grotesque); and a Joachim Luetke sculpture Homunculus (a baby with chicken feet for hands and the lower body of a caterpillar). On a table, the anonymous aborted fetus in formaldehyde given to him as "a beautiful morbid gift" by his ex-wife, burlesque diva Dita von Teese. ...

EDWARD HOPPER is too easily taken for granted: taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light, capable of converting a New England manse into a Fortress of Solitude; voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary; auteur of the diner reverie "Nighthawks," which not long ago was probably better known via Gottfried Helnwein's travesty "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." ...

But what does the hyper-realism of Austrian-born, Irish-based artist Gottfried Helnwein say to us and about us in the context of "Body Anxious"? His work is what puts this show on the map of bodily pain and anxiety. He has painted a hyper-realistic, oversized portrait of a little girl in a pink-and-white undershirt, her head and eyes swathed in gauze so recently wrapped that it glistens with blood. It is from Helnwein's "Los Caprichos" series, named after the famous Goya series. Art historians say Goya's "Caprichos" mark the beginning of the modern world of art because they were the first to look at, rather than avoid or symbolize, pain, fantasy, cruelty, disloyalty and any other number of grievous human traits. ...