To celebrate the 75th birthday of Gottfried Helnwein, the ALBERTINA Museum is showing a large-scale exhibition of his works from the past two decades. The Vienna-born artist Gottfried Helnwein’s oeuvre is characterized by his interest in the themes of pain, injury, and violence. A central motif of his is the figure of the vulnerable and defenseless child as a proxy of sorts, one that embodies all psychological and societal anxieties.

His hyper-realistic paintings, always created with reference to a photographic model, are impressive for their technical perfection. To this day, Helnwein is viewed as a provocateur—having used his work to engage in social criticism from the very beginning: “My work has really always been an attempt to come to terms with or react to that which affects me.”