October 8th, 2008
Austrian Times
Scandal artist Gottfried Helnwein turns 60
Austrian artist, photographer and installation and performance artist Gottfried Helnwein turns 60 today
Helnwein was born on 8 October 1948 in Vienna. Helnwein remembers: "Vienna was black and ugly back then, unlike today."
Helnwein studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (University of the Visual or Fine Arts) in Vienna before he left Austria in the 1980s to work in Germany, Ireland and the US. He once said: "I learned more from Donald Duck than I did in any of the schools I ever attended."
In his long career, Helnwein has worked as a painter, photographer, draftsman, sculptor and muralist as well as an installation and performance artist and used a wide variety of techniques and media.
Helnwein’s early work mainly depicts wounded children, while much of his later work deals with the Holocaust.In 2003, Helnwein got to know Marilyn Manson and started to colloborate with the controversial rock singer on the multi-media art-project "The Golden Age of Grotesque".
Helnwein said: "I am currently working on exhibitions in New York and San Francisco as well as on an exhibit in Tel Aviv for the victims of the Israel conflict."
A Tear on a Journey