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TEXTS
helnwein
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12/09/2020
SKIRA
Helnwein - The Epiphany of the Displaced
edited by Demetrio Paparoni
The new Monograph - Preface by Sean Penn
The most complete monograph realized about the Austrian painter, photographer, filmmaker, performer and set designer, born in Vienna in 1948. The works of Helnwein show the bare truth where society instead hides and removes. What emerges by leafing through the pages of this monograph is the obsession that accompanies the artistic career of this notable Austrian artist, marked by the wish to breakdown the rhetoric of war, the constructions of self-absolution, the mystifications of religious institutions in whose pitfalls men periodically fall as if they had not committed the same mistake over and over again.
mehr
01/12/2004
Palace of the Legion of Honor
San Francisco Fine Arts Museums
'The Child' Exhibition - 130,000 VISITORS- The reviews
Summary of reviews and texts
Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor (of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums), deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers. But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes. Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 17. November 2004
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26/12/2004
San Francisco Chronicle
Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
CRITICS CHOICES 2004 - Helnwein
Steven Winn
Arts and culture
TOP 10 The Gottfried Helnwein exhibition "The Child" at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, July) was chosen as the most important show of a contemporary artist in 2004. "In the first of two shows (the other at the Modernism Gallery in November), Helnwein's large format, photo-realist images of children of various demeanors boldly probed the subconscious. Innocence, sexuality, victimization and haunting self-possession surge and flicker in Helnwein's unnerving work."
mehr
1992
William S. Burroughs
poet
Helnwein' s work
Helnwein, Faces
Edition Stemmle
It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows. Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition.
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1988
Heiner Müller
Black Mirror
English translation
A story by Stephen King. An American schoolboy, twelve or thirteen years old, fascinated in his small-town boredom by documents on the German concentration camps - the way his classmates are by Superman - the formula of his fascination: THEY JUST DID THOSE THINGS... How does a friendly person like Helnwein stand making his - excellent - painting into a mirror of the terrors of this century? Or is it that he can't stand not doing it? Does his mirror just reflect the attitude of the century? TERROR WITHOUT END IS BETTER THAN AN ENDING IN TERROR. It comes from the over-evaluation of death, a consequence of "statistics" making it taboo. Perseus guillotines the Gorgon in the mirror -, and when the head falls, it is his own. How many heads does a person/man have in our age of mirrors?
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12/09/2020
Preface for the monograph 'The Epiphany of the Displaced'
Gottfried Helnwein
Sean Penn
Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it. I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does.
mehr
05/07/2015
Klaus Albrecht Schröder
Die Theatralik des Einspruchs
Direktor der Albertina, Wien
Gottfried Helnweins Kunst ist zutiefst in der Gegenwart verankert. Seine Malerei hat unsere Zeit zum Gegenstand: die Nachtseiten unserer Zeit, Gewalt, Grausamkeit, Krieg, Unterdrückung.
Helnweins eigene Aktionen „Hallo Dulder“ und „Allzeit bereit“ aus den mittleren 1970er-Jahren sind wahrscheinlich die letzten Abkömmlinge von dem, was man als „das Österreichische“ in Helnweins Kunst bezeichnen könnte. Danach ist Helnwein eher ein deutscher Maler, dessen Bilder man neben Gerhard Richters gebrochenem Fotorealismus sehen möchte, um ihren internationalen Stellenwert angemessen zu bestimmen... Die gesamte Kunst Helnweins ist eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Wirklichkeit: aus dem Geist des Einspruchs. Das definiert ihre Schärfe. Das macht ihre Bedeutung und Größe aus.
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15/08/2004
Robert Flynn Johnson
California Palace of the Legion of Honor
The Child - Works by Gottfried Helnwein
Curator, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Curator in Charge
"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot, which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie." - Jean Cocteau
..A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it included self-portraits, is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within.
mehr
01/03/2005
ARTnews
Volume 104/Number 3
REVIEW: Gottfried Helnwein, San Francisco
Kenneth Baker
A highly satisfying survey of his work at the Legion of Honor museum titled "The Child" was dominated by images of children, as was a current exhibition of his more recent work at Modernism.
mehr
1997
Klaus Honnef
Curator for Photography and New Media at Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn
The Subversive Power of Art
Helnwein Monograph
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Helnwein - A Concept Artist before the Turn of the Millennium. Is it sheer coincidence that Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian artist, created a portrait of both the German and the American? Coincidence, that he captured Warhol as a disturbing spectre on photograph, but painted Beuys? And that he then photographed the painted portrait of Beuys in the hands of Arno Breker, Adolf Hitler's favourite sculptor? There are weighty reasons for considering Helnwein the legitimate heir to Beuys and Warhol.
mehr
01/06/1988
Peter Gorsen
THE DIVIDED SELF
"Der Untermensch"
Edition Braus, Heidelberg
Gottfried Helnwein in his self-portraits
Je est un autre, RIMBAUD. Helnwein compared the "quietly theatrical" ecstatic attitude of his self-portrait with the heroic pose of the figure of the suffering figure of Sebastian and generalizes both to the stigma of the artist in the 20th century, making him a kind of saviour figure. In addition, its poetic title sets the viewer onto the right track. The visual montage of the modern artist as Man of Sorrows with Friedrich's landscape painting projects the dashed hopes of the romantic rebellion into the present, to the protest thinking of modernity, which has become introverted and masochistic, and its crossing of aesthetic boundaries. Is romanticism making a comeback? No; actually, it had never left modernity. But its rebellion is confining and introverting itself in the "body metaphysics" of contemporary artists to its own flesh and blood.
mehr
1999
Wolfgang Bauer
Poet
Inspired by Helnwein
Museum of Lower Austria
Apokalypse, Helnwein, installation, one-man show
Helnwein - Inspiration
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.
mehr
14/08/2004
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Gottfried Helnwein: The Child
Harry S.Parker III
Director of Museums Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
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. Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public. The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society.
mehr
01/05/2013
Albertina Museum Vienna
Exhibition catalogue
Looking Inside: A Conversation with Gottfried Helnwein
Howard N. Fox
On the Occasion of the Retrospective of Gottfried Helnwein at the Albertina Museum, May 25, 2013
GH: Vienna, the city I was born into right after the Second World War was a dreary place. The long shadows of the Third Reich were still cast over the city and the smell of death was in the air. I remember the empty streets, ruins of bombed houses, rust, rubble, no colors, no sound. There was a sense of despair. All the grown-ups I saw seemed silent, dark and broken. I never saw anybody laugh, I never heard anybody sing. It was a world that stood still, as if undecided yet if life should go on. What I didn't know then, was that my parents’ generation had recently lost two World Wars in a row and just completed the biggest genocide in history. The only art that I saw in my early childhood were 19th century paintings of tortured, blood-soaked martyrs and saints on the wall of cold churches were I spent a good time of my childhood. Until one day some PR-officers of the occupying American forces, God bless their hearts, thought it a good idea to bring some American culture, say Walt Disney's comic books, to us Nazi-kids in Germany and Austria to re-educate us. Especially the Donald Duck stories by the ingenious Disney artist Carl Barks hit us children like a comet and turned our world upside down. It was a culture shock. For me it was also an epiphany, a religious experience. Opening my first comic book was like leaving my parents’ yesterday-realm of death and darkness and stepping into a bright and infinite future. For the first time I experienced color and speed and the power of fantasy and imagination.
mehr
09/11/2003
Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles
Documentary "Ninth November Night" , Children and the Holocaust in the Art of Gottfried Helnwein
THE ART OF HUMANITY
Jonathon Keats
GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN
In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own.
mehr
10/08/2000
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Ghost in the Shell
Robert A. Sobieszek
Curator of Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000
Historian Peter Selz has compared Gottfried Helnwein's tortured, screaming, and bandaged self-portraits to Messerschmidt's sculptural self-portraits, but the artist has said, " The reason why I took up the subject of self-portraits and why I have put myself on stage was to function as a kind of representative for the suffering, abused and oppressed human being. I needed a living body to demonstrate and exemplify the effect of violence inflicted upon a defenseless victim. There is nothing autobiographical or therapeutical about it, and I don’t think it says anything about me personally.
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01/11/1996 - 06/04/1996
Museum of Fine Art, Otaru, Japan
Helnwein
one-man show
catalogue text by Chikako Imai text by Evgenija Nicolaevna Petrova Chief Curator, State Russian Museum St Petersburg Alexander Borovsky, Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art,State Russian Museum, St Petersburg Günter Zehnder,Chief Curator, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn text by Andreas Mäckler.
mehr
2010
University of California Press
Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys
Peter Chametzky
Two years after Beuy's death the Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein created a striking and odd image bringing Breker and Beuys together. Helnwein posed the eighty-eight-year old Breker unconfortably holding Helnwein's portrait of Beuys in front of his chest. The older man with furrowed brow directs the glossy, skeletal image of Beuys-like an icon painting-away from his own gaze and toward that of the viewer.
mehr
1997
Alexander Borovsky
Curator for Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
The Helnwein Passion
Helnwein Monograph
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
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.
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01/12/1987
Roland Recht
Chief Curator of Museums, Strasbourg
The Self-Portraits of Gottfried Helnwein: A WORLD OF HORROR IN PICTURES
Musée d’Art Moderne, Strasbourg
France
Helnwein, Der Untermensch
From this it may be seen that the Viennese Helnwein is part of a tradition going back to the 18th century, to which Messerschmidt's grimacing sculptures are to belong, on which one of Freud's pupils wrote a long treatise. One sees, too, the common ground of these works with those of Arnulf Rainer or Nitsch, two other Viennese, who display their own bodies in the frame of reference of injury, pain, and death. And one sees how this fascination with body language goes back to the expressive gesture in the work of Egon Schiele.
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