Project Arts Centre ...

As long ago as 1963 a fellow-artist and I imagined the horrible future of a free-lance artist.
The topic of our discussion was not so much finances as the necessity of letting go and totally abandoning oneself.
At the time I had the idea of inventing something like a "fitness training of geniuses".
In retrospect I must say that I know very few artists who have persevered in this imaginary training programme. Gottfried Helnwein is one of them.
Helnwein likes to linger at boundaries.
Whoever wants to pass through is closely examined by him. Like Goya he is one of the magic customs officials of art. (Rousseau, on the other hand, always stayed on the other side of the border even though he really was a customs official by profession!)

Whoever wants to enter the plane of art has to be able to understand and communicate reality. Helnwein is not only an artist but also a perfect transformer.
The so called imagination should not come into play at the beginning of a world, but its nuclear power should be released only at the moment of transformation, of metamorphosis. ...

In addition to over 130 Signac drawings, the Arts Center has amassed a world-renowned collection of fellow Europeans' works on paper. Among the celebrated draftsmen are the familiar names of Rembrandt, Rubens, Cézanne, Degas, Francois Boucher, Alberto Giacometti, Tiepolo and Picasso. Equally important is the ranging from an intimate 15th century Northern silverpoint to numerous examples from the Russian Avant-Garde to contemporary works by Berner Venet and Gottfried Helnwein. ...

The Choice, is an exhibition that identified unknown and emerging artists through the viewpoint of leading contemporary artists. We invited an international group of artists to engage their own curatorial ideas. In the role of curator, these artists had been asked to present the work of artists they have followed or whose work has affected them in a personal way.
Curator/Artists
Ida Applebroog: Jane Higgins, Saeri Kiritani, Lisa Petsu Lagunes
Nicole Eisenman: Alison Kelly, Maria E. Piñeres, Suzanne Wright
Robert Gober: Jonathon Hexner
Antony Gormley: Ignassi Aballi, John Patrick Clayman
Gottfried Helnwein: Iris Andraschek, Danielle Kraay
Damien Hirst: Rachel Howard
Ronald Jones: Eric Schnell
Frank Moore: Aaron Cobbett, Michael Combs
Cindy Sherman: Charles Clough, Susan Jennings, David Krueger, Gail Le Boff
Laurie Simmons: Helen Rousakis, Pedro Barbeito
Kiki Smith: Joey Kötting
Sam Taylor-Wood: Georgie Hopton
Nari Ward: Brett Cook Dizney, Chris Sollars ...

...

"Child's Head", 1991, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 650x403.5
Pg. 278
The early stages of this monumental head can be seen in Helnwein's widely varied portrayals from the seventies of suffering children, but above all in the Cologne installation of anonymous children's portraits "9th November Night" from 1988.
The human face, in particular the child's face, is of great fascination for Helnwein and consequently accounts for one of his central pictorial subjects. The monumental face of a little girl which is introduced here is, as it were, representative of all children. In our adult society oriented towards profit and success, children can almost be described as a fringe group, their interests indeed being observed in a comparatively modest fashion. Against this background, this monumentalizing of the face in connection with the hyperrealistic style of painting is to be understood as an oppressive irritation of our customary experience of perception.
Originally the child's head was shown in a Minorite church in Krems, Stein; in fact it was placed at the focal point of a huge early Gothic room which lent the picture a positively sacral tone. ...

MTV: Sigismondi and Bowie both acknowledge lifting the imagery in his "Dead Man Walking" video from the work of the English painter Francis Bacon.
The look of Floria's most noted video to date, though, [QuickTime,1 MB] "Beautiful People," although it owes a debt to Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, was pretty much the inspiration of the artist, Marilyn Manson.
KURT:
The new wave of rock-video grotesquerie isn't new at all, actually, the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, whose self-portrait adorned the cover of an album by the German band Scorpions some years back, was doing images of medical horror twenty years ago,
and no one in rock has gone as far down the road to happy depravity as photographer Joel Peter Witkin, whose deeply disturbing work, which you might best seek out on your own is much admired by Nine Inch Nails leader Trent Reznor, no slouch at images of icky sickness himself. ...

The works themselves are taken from the artists mind in meditative states. All of them are unearthly while also absolutely everyday. Children, who have been a popular subject during the 20th century - from Chagall to Helnwein - were discredited in Russian art because of sociality and surplus sentimentality. ...

The works of Gottfried Helnwein are technically classified as hyper-realism (surpassing super-realism) and at first glance are practically indistinguishable from photographs. Though realistic in terms of technique, most of Helnwein's works are characterized by metaphorical implications.
Among his works, for example, is a painting of a man blindfolded with a bandage around his head. Featured in magazines and newspapers worldwide, looking at this painting may have caused people to feel its unheard cry.
Throughout most of Helnwein's work is the basic principle of realism laced with metaphor. Viewed in this light, this basic principle can be considered, in a sense, metaphorical under the guise of realism. On the contrary, photographs by Helnwein look like paintings with implications. Included in all of Gottfried Helnwein's work, this basic principle demonstrates a reflection of the aesthetics of popular culture and irony, and represent Helnwein's major outlook on the world.
Gottfried Helnwein is endowed with perfect pitch and distinguished sense of contemporary issues. As a painter whose art deals with issues confronting human society, Helnwein creates a new standard of measuring modernism. ...

I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling of Gottfried Helnwein's "Kindskopf" in the Russian Museum. And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions, seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental space of the museum's "Concrete Hall", originally intended for the demonstration of gigantic sculptural compositions. I realised that I was looking at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new point of view. ...