Although born and educated in post-war Vienna, Gottfried Helnwein isvery much an international artist, with exhibitions of his work beingheld in cities such as San Francisco, Beijing and St. Petersburg. Hispaintings represent a fusion of historic and contemporary artisticpractices, uniting the Romantic aesthetic of Caspar David Friedrich,the political radicalism of Viennese Actionists and the technicalprecision of the photorealists of the 1970’s. Although often based onphotographs, or inspired by film stills, his paintings are built up infine layers of traditional oil paint and represent a degree oftechnical accomplishment rarely seen in European academies. He usesthis technical accomplishment and finesse to carry across the strongpolitical message contained in his art.From the early nineteenth century up to the Nazi era, Vienna was a citywhere extraordinary advances in medicine, psychology and political andsocial theory took place. Helnwein’s art draws inspiration from thiscity. His portraits of children, vulnerable and damaged, can be read asa commentary on psychoanalysis, where internalised traumas are broughtto the surface. Pioneeered in Vienna, Freudian psychoanalysis was tooeasily used to suppress acknowledgement of child abuse. In hisconflation of Nazi propaganda with Catholic iconography, Helnweincritiques the denial of history that enveloped his native country inthe 1950’s. His paintings of Disney characters such as Mickey Mouseevoke consumer capitalism, the theoretical underpinnings of which weredeveloped in Vienna by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, andtransferred, as with so much of the intellectual and artistic life ofVienna, to the United States in the 1930’s. The ruins of post-warVienna formed the backdrop for Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a filmwhich, perhaps not coincidentally, also deals with the damage caused tochildren by the moral corruption of adults.The landscapes, and a cityscape of Vienna, presented in this exhibitiondraw these different threads together. Helnwein takes the panorama,that heroic nineteenth century attempt to contain all knowledge in asingle image, and suborns the green hills of Ireland to hiscontemporary take on the imperial gaze. In like fashion he paints largevistas of the Arizona desert, a landscape so different from the lushIrish fields and yet also very connected, through emigration andthrough images in the films of John Ford, whose Irish sensibilityhelped shape the mythology of the American West. Many of Helnwein’spaintings are of interiors, dark and claustrophobic. These largepanoramic landscapes are a relatively late development in his work and,while they eschew the narrative, they clearly reveal the visionaryquality of his art.

Peter Murray Director, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork