During the tour, curator Blake Milteer stopped the group in front of German artist Gottfried Helnwein’s “Epiphany” (“Adoration of the Magi”). In the large-scale piece that resembles a documentary black and white photograph, a Madonnaesque mother displays her baby to attentive Nazi officers. The baby’s likeness to Hitler is uncanny. Despite, or perhaps because of the distinctly sinister overtones in the piece, it’s easy to be drawn in by the piece.
“Helnwein, characteristically, presents us with an ambiguous, haunting image and leaves us to wonder about its meaning ... ” ...

The two celebs are reportedly going to bring in 2007 holed up in a remote Irish castle to which they travelled to recently. The Presleys will be staying at the exclusive Castle de La Poer in Co Tipperary, the home of Priscilla's pal, the reclusive Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. ...

Some of the biggest names in contemporary art are coming to the Denver Art Museum as part of an unprecedented year-long lecture series., funded by internationally known collectors Vicki and Kent Logan of Vail.
The lineup, titled "Logan Lectures 2007," will feature 10 major artists from around the world whose works are on view in the museum's new $110 million Hamilton Building. The series begins in January and runs through December. Some of their pieces can be seen in the largest of the temporary exhibitions on view as part of the addition's inauguration - "Radar: Selections From the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan." ...

Gottfried Helnwein is an artistic icon in both Europe and America who has exhibited all over the world. His style ranges from comics to hyper-naturalism and even to installation work, but is always founded in an amazing skill and craftsmanship. The show features works of Helnwein’s dating back to the 80s and up to 1997, in a gathering of the best of Helnwein’s work from the past two decades. The most astounding work is, without a doubt, Pietà from 1997, which also introduces some of the main elements that flow through Helnwein’s work—namely the use of motives from religious art and references to major works of art history. ...

At City Hall on Thursday, Nov. 16, the Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution commemorating the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht and recognizing Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein for his contributions to assuring that the Holocaust will never be forgotten. "Ninth November Night," a world-renowned exhibit of Helnwein's work commemorating Kristallnacht, will have its U.S debut at the Judge Lewis Quadrangle in Philadelphia next April. ...

Mr. Kresnik's stage pictures are often powerful. His ''Rheingold'' and ''Walküre'' compaction introduces Wagner; Nietzsche; King Ludwig; various Wagner wives and lovers; Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany; a ''red figure''; and modern-day soldiers and G.I.'s among the characters. Ludwig dances in his familiar blue jacket, naked from the waist down. Alberich hacks off his penis with a giant sword. The first act of ''Die Walküre'' is a trio for three naked men, one of whom becomes visibly pregnant (the wonders of a prosthesis and flesh-colored makeup). This last, it might be argued, successfully reintroduces the transgressive impact of incest to a modern audience lulled by Wagner's music. ...

Conceptual artist Gottfried Helnwein grew up in Vienna after World War II and was deeply influence by the Holocaust, Donald Duck, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones. His art constantly questions society by looking at its impact on the most innocent — the children. ...

Dita Von Teese: "Bespoke - whether it's jewellery design or putting together a party - is like, 'Wow.' I love the way the Regency and Victorian era really knew how to party. There was so much attention to detail. People have become lazy about entertaining. It’s all done to a formula.” Her dream theme is a Marie Antoinette banquet. "I love centrepieces dripping with flowers, berries and fruit. In those days, people would eat the table arrangements, and 1 love that irreverence. Marilyn and Dita were such fun to work with - they let me frame their cheesy childhood photos and put them on the walls of the castle in Tipperary. ...

“Look Now” was a spectacular show comprised of photography, installations, painting and video art. The images were often disturbing as the examples of Gottfried Helnwein’s haunting painting of a child in military dress and Tony Oursler’s disembodied, frog-like talking heads, which amused, admonished and interrogated their audience went fully to show. The exhibit attempted to “confront us with the realities that lie behind and between our fantasies of who we are and of the world in which we live,” and this was certainly chillingly and mesmerizingly achieved. ...

This is the first art history that analyzes the use of Disney imagery by such artists as Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol, Chagoya, Thiebaud, Helnwein, Boltanski, Dion, Pesanto, Ospina, Finley and many more. This book explores the impact of Disney, including artists’ economic and psychological motivations, on contemporary art. Disney refused permission for any images - their and artists. ...

Contemporary Looks "Radar: Selections From the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan" will be the principal opening exhibition. Among, the works on view will be Thomas Schutte's "Grosse Geister," (left), Franz Ackermann's "B 1 (Barbeque with the Duke)" (center) and Gottfried Helnwein's "Epiphany" (right). ...

The child as a symbol of hope, purity and innocence triggers a protective reflex that taps into society's instinct to cherish and protect its young. Any tarnishing of this ideal is naturally going to provoke controversy, with art, literature and advertising strewn with instances of iconoclasts who have upset the moral applecart. (Henry James' novel The Turn of the Screw, the sinister paintings of Balthus, or the candid photographs by Sally Mann, are all examples.) It is within such company that Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein rests, as his controversial works cause people to sit up and take notice whenever he exhibits. Certainly, shocking images of deformed babies, Nazi ephemera and pseudo-religious overtones are not for the faint-hearted. However, the majority of the portrait paintings on show in the current exhibition at the Fenton are perhaps more palatable for the general viewer, as the imagery is comparatively sedate in terms of narrative and symbolism. ...

WITH his bandanna and long dark hair, wearing something that looks like a flak jacket, swarthy Gottfried Helnwein could be a guerrilla or a pirate-revolutionary.
But the rock 'n' roll lifestyle and 17th-Century castle in Co Tipperary adorned with huge canvases tell a different story. He's an artist of serious international reputation, veteran of many controversies, who counts Sean Penn, Marilyn Manson, Norman Mailer and, once, Marlene Dietrich among his friends. ...

With her reddened lips slightly ajar and her eyes gently shut, this little girl could either be in serene repose or even, with her ghostly pallor, dead. Considering the artist who has created this hauntingly compelling image, it's possibly the latter. Gottfried Helnwein, the man in question, has always danced along that fine line of controversy. ...

Helnwein: "We are living in the age where materialism has finally triumphed. The world has been purged of fairies, elves, witches, angels, enchanted castles and hidden treasures. Dreaming and fantasizing is nowadays considered a chemical imbalance in the brain of the child. For reasons of national security there are no realms of imagination anymore in which to escape - children are held in the merciless headlight of the adults level-headed, common-sense-madhouse: a world of stock-markets, war, rape, pollution, television-moronism, prozak, prison-camps, miss universe-competitions, genetic engineering, child pornography, Ronald McDonalds, Paris Hilton and torture." ...

Andy invited me to the factory in New York 1983 and after the usual compliments how he loved my work and so on, he asked me to follow him into an empty room where we sat down opposite to each other and he just froze and he didn't say anything and he didn't move. We sat in silence for some time and I didn't know what to do - at first it was strange and it felt kind of awkward, but then slowly everything started to transcend and the tension dissipated and nothing seemed important anymore. Andy looked like a wax-dummy in the posture of a pharaoh that had been dead since thousands of years - the room around us became darker and darker and the white of Andy's face and hair got a glow so intense that it started to burn my eyes. I realized that we were floating now somewhere in outer space and nothing mattered anymore and I raised my Nikon and shot.
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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. ...

We hear you’re a huge Penn fan. Have you had a chance to meet him?
We’re both friends with the painter Gottfried Helnwein. I was at one of his shows and Sean Penn was there. At one point I was on my cell giving someone directions because they got lost and Penn was looking at me because I was that dick at the art show on his cell phone. Fuck. I just looked down real embarrassed, completely mortified. People are like, “Hey, did you meet Sean Penn?” And all I can say is, “No, not yet.” ...

The near-spectacular gifts of painters such as Scott Hess, Cynthia Sitton, Peter Zokosky and Margret Nielsoen make this anthology as seductive as it is, but the star of the show is Gottfried Helnwein, whose meta-photo-realist apparitions have immediacy and sticking power of ghost stories, crime-site photographs or nightmares. ...

Cover: Gottfried Helnwein, untitled, 2005 ...