circulated by Pamela Auchincloss Arts Management Services

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With a pow and a zap, cartoon imagery has recently exploded. Artists, graphic novelists, and zine makers everywhere are taking advantage of the potential to tell stories in a recognizable and familiar language. From Japan and Israel to the Americas, artists use cartoon imagery to address problematic issues. In the process, they participate in the construction of identity in its many guises, weaving aspects such as race, gender, sexual orientation, violence and war, loss of innocence, and the commodification of identity into complex, layered tales. And at times, they make us laugh at ourselves.

Although cartoons and caricatures have played an important role in Western culture since the Middle Ages, the development of the comic strip and comic books are a unique American phenomenon and has contributed significantly to American visual culture.

...Gottfried Helnwein's "American Prayer," which is a large hyper-realistic painting of a boy kneeling in bedtime prayer to a large and looming Donald Duck.

About Helnwein's piece: Clark says, "In many ways, this is the signature piece for this whole show, because it shows how cartoon imagery has entered our culture, our world, our daily life."

1994 - 01.Jan.1997

Carl Barks - retrospective

Gottfried Helnwein Organizes the First Retrospective Museumshow of the Great Comic Artist

Opening one of these comic books felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I blinked carefully because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the glistening sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze into my dusty lungs that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin.

I was back home again, in a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and run through by bullets without serious harm. A world in which the people still look proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses. And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life - a man who, as the Austrian poet H.C. Artmann put it, is the only person today that has something worth telling us - Donald Duck.

English translation of "Erinnerungen an Entenhausen" , pulished in the German periodical "ZeitMagazin" on May 12, 1989

ZEIT magazin

Gottfried Helnwein

Das Museum der 100 Bilder Bedeutende Autoren und Künstler stellen ihr liebstes Kunstwerk vor Herausgegeben von Fritz J. Raddatz

VORWORT BY ROY DISNEY

Wir sind Gottfried Helnwein zu grossem Dank verpflichtet, dass er die erste bedeutende Ausstellung von Carl Barks' Kunstwerken und den damit verbundenen Katalog ermöglicht hat. Gottfried Helnwein, selbst ein anerkannter Künstler, hat der Kunstwelt mit diesem Projekt einen grossen Dienst erwiesen, indem er über 300 Arbeiten des Künstlers für dieses wirklich bedeutsame Ereignis zusammengestellt hat.

Walt Disney's Micky Maus

Ehapa Verlag, Stuttgart

DIE PANZERKNACKER