Head of a Child 5
mixed media (oil and acrylic on canvas), 1998, 160 x 109 cm / 62 x 42''
IN LIMBO
13. January 2005
Victoria H. Myhren Gallery
School of Art and Art History, University of Denver
Gwen F. Chanzit
Cindy Sherman, Su-en Wong, Gottfried Helnwein, and Mona Hatoum.
An exhibition of works from the Denver Art Museum’s fractional and promised gift of contemporary art from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan.
Although the artists featured in the exhibition In Limbo hail from distant corners of the globe, their work is linked by a shared sense of dislocation, estrangement, and loneliness. These artists allow us into captured moments of uneasiness that seem rooted in individual, sometimes conflicted and alien experiences both within and outside a native environment. Cindy Sherman, Su-en Wong, Gottfried Helnwein, and Mona Hatoum, like other artists in the show, explore an array of altered states and unresolved opportunities – in short, discomfort within their world.
These artists express age-old concerns that have carried over into the twenty-first century.
They embrace the foreign within themselves and the world or, in the words of Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century Saxon monk:
Although the artists featured in the exhibition In Limbo hail from distant corners of the globe, their work is linked by a shared sense of dislocation, estrangement, and loneliness. These artists allow us into captured moments of uneasiness that seem rooted in individual, sometimes conflicted and alien experiences both within and outside a native environment. Cindy Sherman, Su-en Wong, Gottfried Helnwein, and Mona Hatoum, like other artists in the show, explore an array of altered states and unresolved opportunities – in short, discomfort within their world.
These artists express age-old concerns that have carried over into the twenty-first century.
They embrace the foreign within themselves and the world or, in the words of Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century Saxon monk:
“The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place.”
Gottfried Helnwein
Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. He ventures into uncomfortable territory by covertly suggesting that his young subjects posses a sexual identity. Like Wong from Asia and Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation.
(excerpt)