"Rock music, movies, and comic strips are the art of the twentieth century -- elementary, thrilling art forms of enormous power and intensity. I have missed these qualities in most of the hallowed works of high art. In comparison, they often seem anemic and boring and have little to do with life and people."
When Gottfried Helnwein gave this assessment of contemporary art in 1990, his own work had long proved that he was way ahead of his time. He was no rock musician and had never created a comic strip. The movies about him focused on his life and work. Although they were as suspenseful as the most riveting thrillers, they were but a vehicle for his true passion and not the thing itself. What made him world famous were electrifying paintings that penetrate the eye like laser beams. No rock music, no comic strips, and no movies could ever match them.
After his spectacular debut in the 1970s, Gottfried Helnwein (born in 1948 in Vienna) has often culled his motifs from popular culture. He has taken up pressing topical issues and he has nourished dreams. Whether he depicts idols like James Dean, Mick Jagger, Marlene Dietrich, or Clint Eastwood, or subjects such as rape, deformation, or suicide -- he always succeeds in hitting a nerve in our current reality and exposing it by artistic means.
While these paintings have made him a celebrity, Gottfried Helnwein remains committed to his self-imposed goal of coninuously exploring different, astounding directions in art. He continues to prove his creative powers through his unflagging ability to affect and fascinate, schock and amuse a broad public. The effect achieved is the measure of his work's success. It is targeted not at a tiny elite of art experts but at each and every person.Modeled on traditional rules of rhetoric, his paintings are closer in spirit to the aesthetics of effect of the early 19th century than to its modern counterpart of l'art pour l'art. In many Helnwein paintings circulating as posters and record jackets, he uses deliberate formulas which appeal to every sociological group's aesthetic sensibilities. Traditional art viewers are impressed by his paintings' immaculate technical perfection, which is on a par with masterworks of the past. People interested in sociopolitical issues respond to Helnwein's depiction of hypocrisy in all its forms, of environmental pollution and armament, as a call to oppose the powers that be. And young people find their icons in Helnwein's pictures. With his cover designs for leading magazines such as "Time", "Esquire", "Rolling Stone", "Oui", "Playboy", "L'Espresso", "Der Spiegel"," Stern" and many others, he follows a simple rationale: "I would feel frustrated if with my paintings I reached only a few hundred people rather than millions like any ski racer or soccer player"
Even Helnwein's outward appearance may be considered "media-friendly". Down to his signature outfit, the man and his life have been assimilated into the work of a celebrated modern artist. A forceful speaker in public discussions, Helnwein seems rather reserved in private. The artist is a workaholic. He has no other drugs or vices. With work being his sole focus, even friends have a hard time getting to see him. His large castle in Burgbrohl, Germany, is one of the world's busiest workshops. He employs legions of secretaries and assistants. Renate, Helnwein's wife, is in charge of business affairs. Asked about their relationship, he once laughed and said: "It's like Kahnweiler and Picasso. She sees to it that my art is accessible to all. That is my goal."
This artistic maxim obviously runs counter to the ruling perception of art, which is predicted on exclusiveness. But the feeling of immediacy in Helnwein's paintings is so strong and vibrant for the precise reason that the artist has never cut off his ties to contemporary, living reality.
Critics have often branded him as a "Boris Karloff of the brush" or as a "shock painter with a sensitive soul". But whatever clichés the press found for Gottfried Helnwein, they have limped after his genius like the proverbial blind leading the blind. Because no sooner have we captured the artist in a formula than he has already escaped us. When, for example, the scarred, abused children of his early work (a reflection of his own childhood in postwar Austria) threatened to become a macabré cliché, he immediately changed genres. But if anyone thought Helnwein had turned harmless with his numerous celebrity portraits of the early 1980s, a close look at those paintings told a different story. Be it John F. Kennedy or Andy Warhol, William Burroughs or Keith Richards, the artists' gaze unfailingly cuts below the surface of the cosmetically and idealogically enhanced faces.
He increasingly used photography, a medium that had accompanied his artistic work from the beginning. Initially employed for documentary purposes, it developed dynamics of its own. While in his paintings, Helnwein showed an unparalleled photographic sophistication to render his artistic concepts as realistically as possible, his photographic works used often minuscle changes in light and camera setting to merge the different realities of the visable and invisable.
Like no other artist, Helnwein has exposed the fragility of the humans, idols and ideals of the 20th century, which already carry the signs of decay within themselves. Like a battlefield of excess, their skin is etched with the disastrous perspectives and troubled moods, the morbidity, repulsion and melancholy of fading away. Desires fulfilled and hidden, the richness of life lived, injuries, pain and death, the past, present and future of the individual are bundled as in a pitless lens, unrelenting and yet deeply human. If anyone thought that the camera's lens was objective, his belief was thoroughly shattered by Gottfried Helnwein's photographs. In these shots we see a visionary at work, not a chronicler of vanities.
In the mid-1980s, several large-scale works and the 100-meter-long sequence of images of 9. Novembernacht -- created to mark the 50th year after the Nazi horrors of Kristallnacht -- followed as futher variations on the single great theme of Helnwein's art: man in all aspects of his existance. Consequently, his more recent works from 1989 to 1993 are a continuation of the two crucial poles of his art: photographically detailed realism and monochrome. It seems as if in his work the apocalypse of civilization were to unfold under a new sign. No dimension is left out. Horror and transcendence are as close to each other as the trivial alternates with the sublime. Norman Mailer said with some admiration: "Helnwein is one of the few exciting painters we have today." And who would contradict him?