PRESSHelnwein

Two days after the Sandy Hook school massacre, a survival gear company called Black Dragon Tactical composed a new slogan to promote sales of armored backpack inserts. “Arm the teachers,” the company declared on Facebook. “In the meantime, bulletproof the kids.”... The question may be political, but the keenest response is to be found in a museum in Mexico City, the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, at a retrospective of paintings and photographs by the Austrian-American artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein’s extraordinary work depicts the fragile innocence of children. Devoid of grown-up sentimentalism, his images can be overwhelming, especially those that show how that innocence falters in an adult world.

TOP 10 The Gottfried Helnwein exhibition "The Child" at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, July) was chosen as the most important show of a contemporary artist in 2004. "In the first of two shows (the other at the Modernism Gallery in November), Helnwein's large format, photo-realist images of children of various demeanors boldly probed the subconscious. Innocence, sexuality, victimization and haunting self-possession surge and flicker in Helnwein's unnerving work."

Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor (of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums), deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers. But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes. Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 17. November 2004

Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Chris­tian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think." Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is still infused with an uneasy ideal­ism. His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a vet­eran rock star and the lifestyle to match it.

Some might think that Los Angeles - its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane."

February rains flooded the gravel road to Gurteen Castle, a 40-room fortress built in 1866 for Pope Pius IX’s chamberlain. Throughout the Republic of Ireland, stories about power outages dominated the evening news, but the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein and his wife, Renate, their four children and three of their grandchildren were oblivious to the storm. In the castle’s dining room, under the flickering glow of candlelight, they were singing along to a spirited rendition of “Nell Flaherty’s Drake,” a bouncy 19th-century Irish folk song that had them merrily rhyming “astray” and “gray.”

Vienna (AFP) – Art is "probably the only help one has to cope" in a world being traumatised by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, one of Austria's most famous artists told AFP.

Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin. Of all his paintings, the most disturbing is Epiphany (1996), for which he dips into our collective memory of Christianity's most famous birth. This Austrian Catholic Nativity scene has no magi bearing gifts. Madonna and child are encircled by five respectful Waffen SS officers palpably in awe of the idealised, kitsch-blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on Mary's lap, stares defiantly out of the canvas. Helnwein's baby Jesus is Adolf Hitler.

In 'The Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous. Much of the work has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child's world are rent with something untoward. For children, not understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape. Perhaps nothing in the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein's 'Mickey'. His portrait of Disney's favotite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer. This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed. Helnwein's Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless. But Mickey's terrifying demeanor hints of things to come.

Throughout the entire history, the only forces capable of resisting tyranny and suppression are artists, thinkers, and writers. These are the makers of what we call culture, which means the combination of aesthetics and spirituality. Dictators know that, they have a very good sense for the only serious threat to their power: free creation and free communication. On this planet, creating means to stand up, to rebel, to resist, it means striking back.

Any belief system will pre-condition you to see only things that you are supposed to see, but it will make you blind to anything you are not allowed to perceive, even if it happens right in front of you. Through various education systems in all history, people have been convinced to abandon their own values and dreams and have been programmed to think and behave in certain ways. So people have developed a good workable system of selective perception. But there are always those that can’t be broken and properly programmed: artists, writers and thinkers. Nothing scares authoritarian regimes more than art and free creation. Why would Hitler burn mountains of books and paintings and ban all arts? Why would Stalin—the master over life and death of almost 300 million people, a man who commanded the biggest army and secret service that ever existed—be afraid of a poem by Anna Akhmatova? Why would Mao be so obsessed with destroying China’s entire cultural heritage? Why would FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, while denying the existence of organised crime in the US, put so much effort into harassing and spying on every artist from Hemingway, Elvis, Thomas Mann to John Lennon? The last thing any human society wants are free beings. Don’t wait for somebody to grant you freedom, it will never happen; if you want freedom, you have to seize it. Creating art is one way of doing it, and for me it’s the most effective way. On this planet, creating means to stand up, to rebel, to resist. It means striking back.

Her lips are parted and colored a luscious deep red. The pancake makeup on her face gives off a marble-white glow. A jacket, adorned with braided gold epaulets at the shoulders, yawns open, exposing a wide expanse of skin down her chest. She appears to be about 8 years old. There was a time, not so long ago, when the subject of Gottfried Helnwein's new, large-format digital prints at San Francisco's Modernism Gallery might have alarmed or even scandalized a viewer. Not anymore -- or at least not so reflexively... Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers. But the most haunting images, here and across town at Modernism, may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes.

It could have been worse. At least he doesn't look like his self-portraits, in which bandages swathe his head, bent forks pull his mouth into a mocking smile and blood drenches his torso. Helnwein, 52, is a master of the scandalous and the art of shocking. The artist Robert Crumb once said of him: "Helnwein is a very fine artist and one sick motherfucker." "You can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the strong and powerful to slide and totter - anything, actually, if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means."

One piece of public art he did in 1988 - funded fully by himself, after he failed to raise sponsorship - commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. "Again, what amazed me was that nobody talked about it - and yet that was when the horror really started." "I wanted to do it in front of the Dome in Cologne, but the City prevented it. But there was this little strip of land which belonged to the railways, and a guy who worked there said, 'go ahead'. I didn't want to use these historic photographs which are used too often - those mountains of corpses mean nothing anymore - so I used four metre high children's faces. I photographed children from the area, foreign children, German children, Jews, anything." Mounted in a long billboard line, after the huge word "Selection", the children's faces were powdered in a deathly, bruised way, many with their eyes closed. That may sound subtle, but in the context of muted German Holocaust memorials, it was like a slap in the face. Despite CCTV video-cameras, someone painstakingly sliced the throats of every single child-portrait.

The disturbing Work of Helnwein comes to Ireland Helnwein is a headline artist who works in tight sound bites on a very large scale. The works brand themselves with proof of his technical know-how in various media and are endorsed by the coolest celebrities of his generation. So much for the cover-story, so what lies within? Headlines lure you into stories that make you want to cry, smile or help to change the world. But when they stop at your own skin, you can get a sinking feeling, a sense of the bigness and badness outside and the impossibility of change.

The images you are about to see may shock or confound you. Gottfried Helnwein frequently depicts children in his gigantic, mesmerizing portraits, along with "low culture" icons including Donald Duck, with the loss of childhood innocence as a reoccurring theme.

Helnwein in the Rudolfinum Gallery The exhibition entitled “Angels Sleeping” introduces works by the Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein, whose oeuvre has become a phenomenon of hyperrealist painting. His canvases, executed in the manner of photographic preciseness, draw from pop-culture as well as history, and the artist’s great subject is the position of a child in an extreme situation. The exhibition is divided to five sections which present the main subjects of Helnwein’s work, at the same time laying emphasis on his paintings from the most recent years. The first section displays portraits of the artist’s bandaged face; the second section contains references to the Nazi past of Austria, while the central subject of the third and fourth sections is child. The last section presents photographs inspired by pop-culture. The group of exhibited works was loaned from the property of the artist as well as from many public and private collections from Europe and the United States.

Whether hanging with the Stones, zooming in on Warhol or making sure Dietrich wasn’t completely alone, Gottfried Helnwein has always ended up making great art. Stuart Clark tracks him down to his Waterford castle where Nazi Germany, Israel, Lou Reed, Marilyn Mansion, cancel culture, Donald Duck and Elvis are also up for discussion.

February rains flooded the gravel road to Gurteen Castle, a 40-room fortress built in 1866 for Pope Pius IX’s chamberlain. Throughout the Republic of Ireland, stories about power outages dominated the evening news, but the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein and his wife, Renate, their four children and three of their grandchildren were oblivious to the storm. Gottfried, in a skull-print bandanna and black sunglasses, spoke about the spirit of a jealous woman who tormented the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese on her wedding day (she married Gottfried’s friend Marilyn Manson there in 2005 in a ceremony officiated by the surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky). Von Teese was nearly ready to walk down the aisle when the ceiling above her vanity came crashing down, narrowly missing her and her maid of honor.

The only things our children need from us are: freedom and respect. Everything else they bring with them: spontaneity, creativity, intuition, imagination and vision. Children still have a connection to the magic of their own spiritual world, that grown-ups have lost long ago. We should not disturb our children in their dreams and poison their minds with imbecile television, genetically modified junk food, drugs, psychologists, corrupt politics, internet- violence, pornography and oppressive schools. Maybe we should just leave them alone and let them make their own decisions because they are anyway closer to the truth then we are. I think we can learn more from children, than they can learn from us. I agree with Captain Beafheart who said: ‘I needed to purge myself of all the attention my parents had given me - I wasn't neglected enough as a child. ‘

GH: People are constantly bombarded with millions of images of the daily horror from around the world, through mass media, television, internet, which makes us feel helpless, because it tells us there is nothing we can do about it. Art is the exact opposite; with art you can approach any subject, no matter how horrible, because aesthetics can transcend and transform any uglyness, into something beautiful, it can elevate, inspire and might be able to open doors to understanding. My images always dealt with what's happening around me, I wasn’t making things up. From early childhood on when I looked at people around me I perceived them as suffering in some way, without being conscious about it. I thought that most people seemed to be somewhat damaged , and that’s what I started to show in my paintings.

Helnwein's preoccupation with the dark side of modern history, including its abuse of images, has never left him. He did a whole series of paintings (the Legion show includes a couple) so dark as to appear imageless. But he intended them not as mirrors of dark times but as counterthrusts to the aggressive reach of so much contemporary culture. Despite the grotesquerie it contains, the Legion show also has elements of pathos. Helnwein nodded yes when asked whether he has made a theme of innocence. "It's a dangerous word, it's so abused and misused, but yes that's probably the basic essence of what I'm interested in." "As soon as somebody's grown up they have so many issues," he said. "When you look at a person -- what social level, what country they're from, what fashion they affect -- all this stuff comes in, but I'm interested in the stage of a human being where it's not so important whether it's a male or female, before we can tell any social background or anything, it's just ... abstract, almost." ...Probably few visitors will appreciate the detachment in Helnwein's work. They will more likely respond to his concern with the power of images. We willingly subject ourselves to their power every day without really understanding it. If nothing else, his pictures, no matter how confrontational, stand still and permit us, even defy us, to understand how they work upon us.

The nuptials of schock rocker Marilyn Manson and burlesque queen Dita Von Teese were never going to be conventional, but as Hamish Bowles discovered as he tracked the celebrations from Los Angeles to Tipperary, they were also filled with high drama and high style. ... The following afternoon our cars are trundling through the darkening landscape to Helnwein's baronial castle, a forbidding Hammer House of Horror edifice complete with turrets, crenellations, and a lone bagpiper.

Konsequent und virtuos. Technische Meisterschaft und auch die Konsequenz einer packenden sozialkritischen Thematik offenbaren sich in dieser Ausstellung: Gewalt, Schmerz, Verletzung werden dargestellt. Den Körper ebenso wie die Psyche betreffend. Helnwein dokumentiert hier in Linz einen künstlerischen Reifegrad, der eine weitere Steigerung kaum vorstellbar macht. Seine Eingriffe sind von einer schmerzhaften Unmittelbarkeit, deren emotionale Energie weit über die großen Bildformate hinaus den Raum und sein Publikum ergreift. (Irene Judmayer - Oberösterreichische Nachrichten)

... his startling body of work: macabre paintings with photographic resonance played out on a grand scale and often in public settings. Throughout his career, Helnwein has glided easily between watercolor, oil and installation work, but his big subject has always been childhood, and not the happy sort. With titles like ‘‘The Murmur of the Innocents’’ and ‘‘God of Sub-Humans,’’ these works — executed with obsessive, old-master-worthy technique — can be as bludgeoning as, say, a Rammstein riff, but you can’t take your eyes off them.

An alternative title to “Angels Sleeping” for this exhibition could be “All Hail to the Wounded Child,” as many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwien’s works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us, not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs and disturbances. If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition, it would be a long, endless scream. Tony Ozuna, The Prague Post, 02. July 2008

Essentially a hyperrealist artist of quite extraordinary facility, Gottfried Helnwein's huge Photorealist canvases are awash with references to religious Renaissance paintings, the dark allure of Nazi imagery and his background in the ruins of post war Vienna. His strategy is often of deliberate shock and provocation, from his earliest extreme watercolors of doll-like, wounded children with their hare-lips and facial disfigurements, which prompted cartoonist Robert Crumb to call him "a very fine artist and one sick mother---er."

Gottfried Helnwein’s first one-man exhibition at a major American museum is long overdue. 35 years in the making, “The Child” is a collection of more than fifty drawings, watercolors, photographs, and paintings (several monumental in size). It’s also a show that shocks, and among the crowds thronging to see it, some patrons will be put off: the day I attended, a few seemed downright uncomfortable, if not hostile, toward the work. This is fine. Art should shock, and provoke, and make us feel queasy sometimes. “The Child” achieves all three, but also startles us with aching beauty, bedazzles us with painterly skill, and injects a necessary perspective into the culture’s collective conscience.

While it is a painting, Epiphany is typical in its almost interchangeable use of photography and painting: both played their part in the achievement of the eventual, quasi-photographic image. He is a fine photographer, and his photographic portraits of Kilkenny children (enlarged to an enormous scale) form one strand of his festival exhibitions. The careful adaptation of existing imagery is another trait, and his references extend back through fine art history as well as history itself...

The thing you should know about this "Rosenkavalier" is that it is terrific. Richard Strauss' opera sounds great and looks sensational. It is excellently sung, sumptuously conducted by Kent Nagano and, thanks to Gottfried Helnwein, wondrously strange. Helnwein — the Austrian artist (painter, photographer, performance artist, filmmaker) who has a studio in downtown L.A. — is known for everything from Marilyn Manson videos to Holocaust installations. He is responsible for the sets, costumes and that ad (which, by the way, looks like an image from a recent staging of a Schumann oratorio that Helnwein designed in Düsseldorf). Helnwein's vision of "Rosenkavalier" is monochromatic and a riot of color. It is oddly traditional yet seriously odd. It is updated but couldn't be more 18th century. And none of those opposites contradicts.

...these photo-paintings appear even more real than a photograph: they are hyper-real, super-saturated depictions of the world that surrounds us, as we would like to see it. Helnwein’s landscapes offer us the world as we see it in our mind’s eye, our memories. What is certain is that with these works Helnwein has raised the bar for artists to come with art that is groundbreaking in terms of scale, skill and vision. Painted mountains, fields and sky can never be the same again. ...

"For me, art is a way to fight back against everything I've experienced: I wanted to respond, but I didn't know how to articulate it. But I could paint it. That medium opened all doors. Certain images can reach so deeply into people's souls. "And I feel also like a witness to my times - that's my duty, my responsibility." One role of art, he believes, is to "force people to look at things they would rather not look at," an impulse he sees in Goya and Shakespeare.

At nights my room was plunged into a deep, red light - my toys, the furniture, my bed, my hands - everything had the same color and seemed to be made of the same soft material. As though the natural laws were suddenly suspended, all matter seemed to glow from the inside out. The explanation for this red magic was the large illuminated star of the Red Army on the roof of the factory across the street, which poured it’s fire nightly into my room.

Helnwein, the controversial Austrian artist whose works is currently on show at the Robert Sandelson gallery in London, has always been a difficult personality to pin down. He chose to exhibit all three "Epiphany" paintings alongside a series of photographs of 19th century stillborn foetuses in an exhibition entitled "Apokalypse". Hung together in a Dominican church in Weinstadt in Austria, the final effect was one of haunting beauty, each child framed magnificently within the high vaulted ceiling of the church. The juxtaposition of these serene yet poignant images of "beings that never were" placed next to paintings that recalled the ideological terrors of the past, created a synthesis of values as politically dynamic as they were aesthetically entrancing. Yet throughout his career as an artist Helnwein has never ceased to use his work as a way to question his immediate surroundings.

The creator of the alluring image is artist Gottfried Helnwein, who transfers the power and pull of his photographic work (check out www.helnwein.com to get a taste of some of the heaviest, most uncompromising visuals you will see in several lifetimes) to the sets and costumes of Der Rosenkavalier. Helnwein's poster concept cuts through the traditional coyness and goes straight for the nugget of truth that no doubt had Lesbian and Gay audiences nudging and winking for the past century. With the bold-but-tender image of two gently bussing females, Helnwein gives the casual observer "something to think about." Oh, yes!

The Austro-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein is responsible for the artworks in this issue. With his hyper-realistic pictures, whose most common subjects are pain, injury and violence, Helnwein (born in 1948) is certainly one of the best-known and at the same time most controversial of German-speaking artists.

Helnwein's realization of the final scene takes the breath away: a view of dozens of bloodied children's bodies, some of them hanging, some of them turning over and over in mid-air, as a vocal ensemble sings their words while kneeling on stage. This vision connects eerily with an exhibition in the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Centre plaza, adapted from one the Austrian Artist mounted in Cologne in 1988, marking the 50th anniversary of the Nazis' anti-Jewish Kristallnacht. It shows two rows of innocent, haunted-looking child's faces, one row with eyes open; the other with eyes closed, lined up as if in a concentration camp (Selektion is the exhibit's title).

We met with Helnwein a day after his solo exhibition opened at Friedman Benda in New York. The minute he sat down and started talking, it was as if we were catching up with an old friend. He held nothing back. We discussed our respective childhood experiences, Austrian guilt, isolation, his practice, the importance of art, and what it's like to live in a castle. Helnwein is a real person.

"My first performance was with six-year-old Sandra, who was considered a problem child by her parents. I think her mother had a hard time coping with Sandra’s wicked sense of humor. One time, as protest for being locked in her room, she cut up all her mother’s clothes into tiny little pieces, arranged them in a neat pile in the middle of the floor and called her mum with the innocent voice of an angel. Another time she set fire to her parent’s apartment. She was one tough and mean little lady, but I liked her instantly. She had the pride of a Latino street gang leader. When she looked at you, her piercing little eyes had a very clear message: “Don’t mess with me!”

Category International Journalism: Personality Profile

Baumgartner Galleries is introducing the work of Gottfried Helnwein, a young Viennese artist who shares what seems to be an Austrian obsession with highly detailed realism - with a surrealistic edge. Trained at the Austrian Academy, and now in the process of moving to New York, Helnwein makes figurative drawings and watercolors that are occasionally gruesome, sometimes haunting and always ambiguous. Spatial and narrative ambiguity are, in fact, the central expressive devices in Helnwein's art.

An alternative title to “Angels Sleeping” for this exhibition could be “All Hail to the Wounded Child,” as many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwien’s works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us, not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs and disturbances. If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition, it would be a long, endless scream.

Workmen finish one of a series of prints measuring 9.3 metres by 6.2 metres by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein.The prints of Kilkenny children will hang on buildings in Kilkenny as parts of its arts festival beginning on August 10th.

It’s a foggy, cloud-streaked afternoon in Waterford County, Ireland. I’m meeting a man who has spent a large part of his life on this island that is famously steeped in tradition. He’s called this place home for some while. Ireland has a long history of treating its artists, literary figures and musicians well.

The Helnweins are cutting a wide swath through Los Angele's various scenes - the kind of creative energy that seems to come naturally. As children of the Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein, siblings Mercedes and Ali experienced an unconventional and charmed upbringing. They lived in castles in Germany and Ireland, attended a private arts school in England and accompanied their father on trips to America, where they sold their drawings to hotel guests to buy stuffed animals at the gift shop. These days, Mercedes, 31, and Ali, 29, are drawing on that background in their own artistic endeavors: Mercedes as a novelist and visual artist and Ali as a composer and musician, with an emphasis on classical music. They bring a fresh, somewhat ironic playfulness to their chosen mediums that has attracted a raucous group of young fans not typically associated with traditional galleries or classical music concerts. In this way, they stand at a colorful intersection of L.A.'s literary, pop culture, visual art and music scene. And they are rarely at rest, working on several projects at once and often collaborating with each other on videos or performances.

Helnwein: "I think art always reflects the society and the time the artist lives in; it always tells you something about the condition of the culture. This is the age of materialism and profit, accompanied by its favorite all-eating pet – the entertainment industry. Therefore in order not to sink into oblivion, in a desperate struggle to be heard and seen, many artists and curators try to compete with this multi-media-entertainment-Godzilla, trying to be just as loud and cheap and stupid. That’s why 70% to 80% of all the contemporary art in our museums is crap. It’s true though that each time has its own aesthetic values and if you want to reach the people of today you have to develop an artistic language that they can understand. And that’s what I try to do – my audience is the great love-affair of my life. I am obsessed with my public, and all I want to do with my art is touch them and move them and to hold them tight – and sometimes I want to kick their ass. That is all I care about. But I also listen to them and take them and their responses serious, because they and other artists are the only ones that ever taught me anything."

Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. His work is hauntingly gorgeous and suffused with pathos, precisely because viewers are immediately aware of the larger threat that looms within the pieces: the rupture of innocence.

Dance icon Gregor Seyffert, and Gottfried Helnwein, internationally renowned artist and stage designer, came up with a highly intelligent concept for the oratorio, which relied heavily on dance, but also comprised whatever means a modern, multimedia stage design might offer. Consequently, the audience’s eyes almost popped out of their heads. With all the media activities, one might almost forget the enchanting, beautiful music, and singing. Storming, unceasing applause by an enthusiastic Düsseldorf audience for an evening which is unlikely to be easily forgotten. This was an example of lively music theatre, which, unchallenged, not only stole the glory of Deutsche Oper am Rhein, which presently enjoys a period of profound hibernation, but proved that Düsseldorf may well offer first class art. Why not more often? (Peter Bilsing)

What dominates, however, in a manner I've seldom seen is Helnwein's use of color -- the monochromatic blue of Act 1 even extends to skin color. Herr von Faninal's house is bathed in a rich golden sheen, from the orange glow of Ochs' silly wig to the platinum of the lovely Sophie's almost-there dress. The final act, in a cheap restaurant, is mainly a glaring red, again from Ochs' wig to his skin and the costumes of the huge band of players. The walls of the restaurant are, incidentally, lined with Helnwein's own works, mainly huge photo-realistic portraits of contemporary women. The 200 costumes Helnwein designed for the piece deserve a whole review for themselves this is inventiveness gone wild, a genius concept, and a huge addition to the production. There might be purists in disagreement here, but this would seem to be a "Rosenkavalier" for the ages.

There has never been a production with such a quality around: amazing singing, brilliant direction, a shining orchestra and a magical set. The Israeli Opera is at its amazing best. Kurt Rydl only opens his mouth and he brings the house down. It is not only his great voice, it is his humor, his style, his singing. Soprano Nancy Weissbach (the Marschallin) touches heaven with her voice. It is a voice of a stylized diamond. Stephanie Houtzell has a charming stage presence with a voice that is no less beautiful than Agnes Baltsa. And a new star is born: Israeli soprano Chen Reiss (Sophie) projects a crystal clear voice. Maximilian Shell managed to puts a grain of sadness into the comic side of the opera and for a moment it seemed like Gottfried Helnwein’s magical set will start to sing as well.

We see the painter and designer jousting with the lighting designer over what will prove to be Helnwein’s greatest coup de theater, a hypnotic final-act tableau of dozens of “dead children” suspended in black space. This time there can be little doubt that Helnwein’s judgment is correct; even on screen the effect is startling and eerily beautiful.

Auxiliary Magazine: Many pieces of your work are intimate glimpses to fascist figures and groups. Is this a theme you still feel is relevant? Helnwein: Mussolini once said: "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power". Well, look around - does it look like there is a growing influence of bankers and big corporations on our governments and our lives? The new Fascists will not come as grim looking brutes in daemonic black uniforms and boots, they will wear slick suits and ties, and they will be smiling.

Some of the most powerful images that deal with Nazism and Holocaust themes are by Anselm Kiefer and Helnwein, although, Kiefer’s work differs considerably from Helnwein’s in his concern with the effect of German aggression on the national psyche and the complexities of German cultural heritage. Kiefer is known for evocative and soulful images of barren German landscapes. But Kiefer and Helnwein’s work are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in a post-war German speaking countries... William Burroughs said that the American revolution begins in books and music, and political operatives implement the changes after the fact. To this maybe we can add art. And Helnwein's art might have the capacity to instigate change by piercing the veil of political correctness to recapture the primitive gesture inherent in art.

A new exhibit called "The Child," through Nov. 28 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, presents images of distressed, wounded or threatened children, a topic that has fascinated Helnwein for years. Many of the children depicted in the show have deformities, bandages, scars or wounds; some appear threatened by menacing adults or by mayhem. Their suffering, indeed wrenching to witness, inevitably becomes a statement about the human condition. A 55-year-old father of four, Helnwein sees himself as an artist with a message. "A big part of contemporary art is not connected to anything," he said. "It's important for certain artists to respond to what's going on in present time." Curator Robert Flynn Johnson believes it is appropriate to display art with a moral message. "Museums shouldn't be like Rip Van Winkle, in a state of catatonic sleep," he says. "They should take on issues. Otherwise they will be seen just as a low-grade entertainment vehicle. We're not out to shock -- we're out to make people think." Johnson places Helnwein in the tradition of such contemporary activist artists as filmmakers Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11") and Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"), painter Gerhard Richter and painter Sue Coe, whose "deadmeat prints" include images of animal slaughter. Museum officials have posted notices in the museum lobby and outside the gallery to warn people that viewer discretion is advised. Officials at the Legion hope the exhibit will reach an audience that more typically comes to blockbuster shows on classical Egypt or the Old Masters. "If I do a show like this one that upsets the docents,"Johnson says, "I know that I've got a good show."

Do you have any art in your home? - Gottfried Helnwein I own. I have a few pieces of his from his recent L.A. series. We ultimately ended up working together on a video project for Peter Gabriel [“The Barry Williams Show”]. Some things that are familiar lose their gravity after time. When someone like him makes the familiar so continually provocative, you can find a deepening appreciation for something.

Austrian born artist Gottfried Helnwein so often finds himself in the eye of the storm, it must feel like home. He is known for highly charged paintings and photographs of suffering children, Nazi themes, and then also magnificent bucolic landscapes. His fans outnumber his detractors, though, and he has won many admirers and collectors both in his adoptive home of Los Angeles, and around the world. Among them, California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenneger, actor Sean Penn, and musician Marilyn Manson, who is a frequent subject. He identifies strongly with the oppressed, and society's most vulnerable members: children. "When I see how kids grow up , how they are neglected and mistreated , how they get polluted with drugs, junk food, insane television and bad schools, it's terrible, - and dangerous, because they are our future. Children are sacred - we need to protect, support and encourage them."

These paintings are about America, I guess from a very European point of view. They're based on photographs, mainly newspaper photographs, of the Fifties and Sixties from archives in New York and L.A. Most people in these pictures are real people, caught in some long forgotten, petty events. I rearranged the scenes, introduced new characters, and created new relationships and contexts. And then I painted them in black and blue. That's how I remember America back then in the early Fifties in Vienna, where I was born. The big war had ended a few years ago, but the city still seemed undecided as to whether this was the end of the world or if life should go on. It was a strange, sad and surreal world. The streets were empty, the houses dark - many of them in ruins from the bombings. The few people I saw seemed ugly, clumsy, and depressed. I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard anybody sing. It was a world without sound and colour. Everything moved in slow motion, like slime. We had no phones, no television, no cars, no music, no pictures, except the paintings of tortured people in the Roman Catholic church which made a deep impression on me, haunting me in the sleepless nights of my childhood limbo. And then, without any warning, suddenly there was America. When I saw the first picture of Elvis I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful. That was the beginning of the never-ending flood of American images that suddenly came over us and started to penetrate and transform everything.

WITH his bandanna and long dark hair, wearing something that looks like a flak jacket, swarthy Gottfried Helnwein could be a guerrilla or a pirate-revolutionary. But the rock 'n' roll lifestyle and 17th-Century castle in Co Tipperary adorned with huge canvases tell a different story. He's an artist of serious international reputation, veteran of many controversies, who counts Sean Penn, Marilyn Manson, Norman Mailer and, once, Marlene Dietrich among his friends.

"Finally we are living now in a society that is a combination of what Huxley foresaw in his "Brave new World" and Orwell in his "1984". We are caught in a stream of constant propaganda and we are under total surveillance. This is the Age of materialism, consumerism and decadence. Our heroes are idiots like trash-princess Paris Hilton, in their sad 15 minutes of fame. Children are shooting other children in schools before they kill themselves and in other parts of the world they blow themselves up in the middle of crowds. Doesn't that look like the end of a civilization, the second fall of Rome?"

HEY, there's Mickey Mouse at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art! Wait a minute. That's not my perky little pal from ''Steamboat Willie.'' This Mickey looks a little mean. This Mickey looks like Michael Eisner's id. Nice Mickey. Don't hurt me. Here's a dollar. That's how it goes at ''The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection,'' perhaps the first show to suggest that there are indeed monsters under the bed, and you might as well get used to it. SFMOMA curatorial associate Heather Whitmore Jain struck the perfect note by opening the show with Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's massive and menacing oil and acrylic ''Mickey.'' It's hard to imagine another contemporary symbol so perfectly balanced between beloved childhood icon and its day job as a corporate logo. Helnwein chooses an earlier Mickey, with the smaller, darker eyes and the longer, more ratlike nose to help make his point. With his pasted-on smile and forward lunge, this Mickey looks more ready to negotiate cable and Web rights than to comfort a preschooler.

Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Chris­tian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think." Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is still infused with an uneasy ideal­ism. His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a vet­eran rock star and the lifestyle to match it. The Sunday Times, Gerry McCarthy

The Book Bukowski in Pictures is the first pictorial biography of cult writer, Charles Bukowski. The writer's extraordinary private and public life is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, most published for the first time. Extracts from Bukowski's poetry and prose are sprinkled throughout, together with drawings, cartoons, manuscripts, rare broadsides and personal letters. It features powerful new portraits of Bukowski by leading photographers such as Gottfried Helnwein and Tony Lane, former art director of Rolling Stone, as well as work by R.Crumb. All photographs have detailed captions by biographer Howard Sounes who has also written a powerful introductory text with new revelations gleaned from Bukowski's recently declassified FBI file. The end result is a fascinating life in pictures that will be essential for all Bukowski fans.

The New York Observer recently spoke with Janine Cirincione of the Friedman Benda gallery about the provocative young artist Gottfried Helnwein's first show, "I Was A Child," which runs there through Oct. 23. For a taste of his grim works, check out our video preview below.

When the powers behind the 2010 Tel Aviv production of Hanoch Levin's Holocaust opera The Child Dreams sought a designer, it seemed like plain sailing to bring on the Austrian provocateur Gottfried Helnwein, distinguished alumnus of what he calls "the same academy that rejected Adolf Hitler twice—which is, of course, the biggest mistake that any university has ever made in history."

"...When I look at a work of Art I ask myself: does it challenge me, does it touch, move or inspire me? Do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me - do I get excited, upset? That is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any information about art? I’ve always had a problem with art that you can only understand if you have a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories in general. Most of them are bullshit anyway. Most critics and theorists have little respect for artists, and I think the importance of theory in art is totally overrated. Real art is self-evident. Real art is intense, challenging, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Like the Blues, a poem of Rimbaud or Rembrandt's late self-portraits. Art is not logic, and if you really want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something spiritual that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul. Think of Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Mozart, Howling Wolf, Goya, Bukowski or Robert Crumb - do you need to know the theories that some busybodies might attach to their art in order to experience it? Marcel Duchamp said: "The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity." These two poles is all you need.

What do Marilyn Manson, Mickey Mouse, violence against children and Nazism have in common? There may be a few ways to answer that question, but Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition, Angels Sleeping, brings these topics together most powerfully, and might expose a few feelings of anguish you never knew you had. If you have yet to experience the hyper-realistic paintings of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, head to the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague at once. The art on offer spans his work from the 1970s up to the present day, split into five key sections that explore his most common themes of psychological and sociological suffering, with paintings so realistic you’ll question your own eyes.

HELNWEIN: "LA is a strange place. A few blocks from my studio the streets are filled with thousands of homeless people, huddling on sidewalks or staggering through the streets - and from time to time some lost soul is gesticulating franticly and shouting at invisible enemies. I live and work in the so called “artist district” in downtown Los Angeles - an innocent little island with old warehouses and brick buildings that look like leftovers from a noir movie set, inhabited by artists, photographers, musicians, skinny girls with nice tattoos, freaks and Japanese students from SCI-Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture) placed in the former Santa Fe Rail Road freight-depot, a concrete block one-quarter of a mile long. The heart of the artist district is the Groundworks Cafe in a red-painted building across from the old, run-down American Hotel where Bukowski once wrote the screenplay for Barfly. The air is heavily polluted from all these diesel trucks that blow their unfiltered exhaust gases through their erected chrome-pipes into the air of downtown. When I touch my paintings my hands gets black from the layers of black dust that sets on everything."

For his new collection of images, Berkeley photographer Richard Nagler spent a lot of time in museums. He also spent a lot of time waiting. Stationed in front of a work of art, he would wait for someone to come along and complete it. The serendipitous, unposed results come from both Nagler’s creative eye as well as his patience. Looking at Art, The Art of Looking, published by Berkeley’s Heyday Press, and launching tomorrow night at Mrs Dalloway’s bookstore in Berkeley, is the culmination of all those hours spent at major art museums around the world.

Helnwein: "We are living in the age where materialism has finally triumphed. The world has been purged of fairies, elves, witches, angels, enchanted castles and hidden treasures. Dreaming and fantasizing is nowadays considered a chemical imbalance in the brain of the child. For reasons of national security there are no realms of imagination anymore in which to escape - children are held in the merciless headlight of the adults level-headed, common-sense-madhouse: a world of stock-markets, war, rape, pollution, television-moronism, prozak, prison-camps, miss universe-competitions, genetic engineering, child pornography, Ronald McDonalds, Paris Hilton and torture."

Gottfried Helnwein is an artistic icon in both Europe and America who has exhibited all over the world. His style ranges from comics to hyper-naturalism and even to installation work, but is always founded in an amazing skill and craftsmanship. The show features works of Helnwein’s dating back to the 80s and up to 1997, in a gathering of the best of Helnwein’s work from the past two decades. The most astounding work is, without a doubt, Pietà from 1997, which also introduces some of the main elements that flow through Helnwein’s work—namely the use of motives from religious art and references to major works of art history.

But what does the hyper-realism of Austrian-born, Irish-based artist Gottfried Helnwein say to us and about us in the context of "Body Anxious"? His work is what puts this show on the map of bodily pain and anxiety. He has painted a hyper-realistic, oversized portrait of a little girl in a pink-and-white undershirt, her head and eyes swathed in gauze so recently wrapped that it glistens with blood. It is from Helnwein's "Los Caprichos" series, named after the famous Goya series. Art historians say Goya's "Caprichos" mark the beginning of the modern world of art because they were the first to look at, rather than avoid or symbolize, pain, fantasy, cruelty, disloyalty and any other number of grievous human traits.

Originally conceived in 2004 with pre-production throughout 2005 via The Wild Bunch (UK) and with an initial budget of $5-7 million, 'Phantasmagoria' was due to begin filming in 2006. Lily Cole, inspiration of Tim Burton's recent 'Alice in Wonderland', was originally cast as Manson's Alice for 'Phantasmagoria'. This teaser also features real-life twin sisters engaging in questionable acts and burlesque superstar Dita Von Teese. The figure in the medical mask is artist Gottfried Helnwein, and the bird-face masked character and white-gloved Lewis Carroll impresario [are both] Marilyn Manson.

My work process is based on passion, intuition and curiosity. I don't have a specific plan or method. I just keep moving forward, and each work is a new attempt to get closer to my basic vision, knowing that I will never fully reach it.

- The Los Angeles Opera's much-anticipated new production of Strauss's "Rosenkavalier" opened on Sunday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and you can bet that the high-concept and boldly stylized sets and costumes by the designer and visual artist Gottfried Helnwein are going to provoke the strongest reactions. Restraint was not a hallmark of the outlandishly captivating production. In a detailed program note, Helnwein writes that the era of Maria Theresa was a time when everything was theater, at least for the upper class, and that over-the-top fashion styles often included masks and white-face. His designs combine spartan sets with wildly extravagant costumes ranging in style from the surreal to the ridiculous. Act I is bathed in shades of blue. In their stiffly modern blue suits and blue-faced makeup, the Marschallin's notaries look like the members of Blue Man Group. In Act II, the mansion of Herr von Faninal, a wealthy commoner with aristocratic pretensions, glows with garish golden yellows. Faninal's servants could be creatures from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," no doubt an intentional evocation: the production begins with projected scenes from Robert Wiene's 1926 silent film adaptation of "Der Rosenkavalier," and Wiene also directed "Caligari." In any event, the cast seemed empowered by the production.

Earlier this week, it emerged that controversial Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein will unveil a tribute to Michael Jackson at the event. The artist, photographer and installation and performance artist, who was a friend of the singer, will reportedly show larger than life portraits of children and paintings of Jackson himself. Helnwein collaborated with Jackson several times and the singer used a Helnwein painting of wounded children for the booklet for his 1995 album Save "HIStory”. The Vienna-born artist has in the past caused controversy and public outrage with his work, much of which focuses on children and the Holocaust.

An artist with conscience, a fearless man with a penchant for profoundly bizarre and complex, meaningful images, Gottfried Helnwein is making a grand re-entry to San Francisco. His work was exhibited here four years ago when his freaky mixed-media portrait of Mickey Mouse - "Mouse I" - was part of the SF Museum of Modern Art's "The Darker Side of Playland - Childhood Imagery." The paintings are extraordinary, grotesque, powerful, "difficult" and challenging, according to Parker and the curator of the Legion exhibit, Robert Flynn Johnson. They are all that, and more. A simple description of the works, without context, would only indicate a freak show: a photo-like painting of Hitler with two very Aryan-looking children, an actual bar of soap encased under them; a group of uniformed Nazis gazing adoringly on a contemporary Mother and Child (Helnwein explaining that the people in the photograph that was the basis for the painting were actually surrounding Hitler); images of normal children mixed with misshapen, ill, tortured youngsters. "Why would people cause so much pain to others?" Helnwein asks, and he shows the pain, unflinchingly, but not to titillate the demented or to horrify the ignorant. "The Child" - located in a part of the Legion next to a permanent exhibit of Renaissance Mother and Child images by Pontormo, Tintoretto, Raphael, and others - has far more to offer than politics, morality, controversy and horror. Although there is no doubt that primarily Helnwein is "the artist as provocateur," he is also an artist in the sense of creating unique and lasting images.

MTV: Sigismondi and Bowie both acknowledge lifting the imagery in his "Dead Man Walking" video from the work of the English painter Francis Bacon. The look of Floria's most noted video to date, though, [QuickTime,1 MB] "Beautiful People," although it owes a debt to Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, was pretty much the inspiration of the artist, Marilyn Manson. KURT: The new wave of rock-video grotesquerie isn't new at all, actually, the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, whose self-portrait adorned the cover of an album by the German band Scorpions some years back, was doing images of medical horror twenty years ago, and no one in rock has gone as far down the road to happy depravity as photographer Joel Peter Witkin, whose deeply disturbing work, which you might best seek out on your own is much admired by Nine Inch Nails leader Trent Reznor, no slouch at images of icky sickness himself.

Andy invited me to the factory in New York 1983 and after the usual compliments how he loved my work and so on, he asked me to follow him into an empty room where we sat down opposite to each other and he just froze and he didn't say anything and he didn't move. We sat in silence for some time and I didn't know what to do - at first it was strange and it felt kind of awkward, but then slowly everything started to transcend and the tension dissipated and nothing seemed important anymore. Andy looked like a wax-dummy in the posture of a pharaoh that had been dead since thousands of years - the room around us became darker and darker and the white of Andy's face and hair got a glow so intense that it started to burn my eyes. I realized that we were floating now somewhere in outer space and nothing mattered anymore and I raised my Nikon and shot.

Famous Austrian designer and artist Gottfried Helnwein designed the set and costumes for “The Child Dreams” Opera.  He also presents his work outside the opera. Helnwein says his work and the playwright’s have a strong internal connection.  Gottfried Helnwein: “In my work, the center of everything was always the child, the child versus the world of death, the world of corruption, the world of greed and destruction, and the child standing for innocence, purity, and I think that's a spirit of the play.”

To those who maintain that art has become toothless for not asking the big questions, Helnwein stands out for having credibly staked out the moral high ground.

Helnwein is famously confrontational, and his bold conflations of Nazi and Christian iconography, in Epiphany and other prominently displayed pictures, predictably generated some friction. Yet, in a way, one shouldn't rush to condemn condemnations of, or expressions or resignation about, Helnwein's work, no matter how superficial or uninformed they turn out to be. Because, let's face it, a large part of its effectiveness had to do with its calculated, barbed ambiguity. The point of the images is that they put it up to you as a viewer. Given that, one potential line of criticism is that they are designed solely to be provocative, like Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley. But the abiding strength of Helnwein's work is that provocation is a means rather than an end; it is - however uncomfortable - morally grounded, if not necessarily in a way that will please all observers... His beautiful photographs of Kilkenny children are, collectively, a recognisable derivative of his work Selection, which implicitly placed the viewer in the position of someone marking children for extermination. Strong stuff. If that seems irrelevant in an Irish context, one could always point to Northern Ireland and to the scandals that have shaken the complacent authority of church and state in recent years. What is more innocent, more open, more charming than the face of a child? Except that we are more than ever uncomfortably aware that the act of looking is not at all innocent, and Helnwein's children, with their closed, downcast eyes, decline to meet our collective gaze. Why? Perhaps because they insist on remaining within the orbits of their imaginations. There is also, however, a slight unease arising from the uniformity of the images and the awareness that the subjects are being directed. Helnwein has a knack for throwing responsibility for what we are looking at back onto us, the viewers.

Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition I Walk Alone is pretty unnerving, and that is his point. Large-scale photo-realistic paintings confront the viewer like a series of film stills forming a bizarre and disturbing sequence of nightmares. Using digital photography and computer-generated images combined with classical painting techniques, many of the images are only black and white, while others use one additional color, such as red, to dramatic and horrifying effect. The images might be seen as bits of individual stories, or pieced together in a variety of frightful ways, or seen as a generalized narrative of brutality and terror, in which innocence is perhaps relative. We are all implicated in Helnwein’s unfolding dramas.

In 1996 Gottfried Helnwein painted the Adoration of the Magi with Adolf Hitler as Baby Jesus, which was displayed at the State Russian Museum St. Petersburg, the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Denver Art Museum,Museum Ludwig and others.

Gottfried Helnwein- Retrospective in the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg

The child stares out from the publicity photos, skin white with dust and eyes expressionless. In a society fluent in the language of news media it's almost impossible not to interpret the blank face of Gottfried Helnwein's photo Child1: it becomes a symbol of lost innocence and silent accusation. The show this image promotes, Close Your Little Eyes, is a music theatre-installation devised by composer and director Max Lyandvert. Taking as its starting point a lullaby from the Vilnius Ghetto, it juxtaposes visual and sound images with music scored for 16-voice children's choir, string quartet and soprano soloist.

The Rules of Attraction promotional campaign skirted with controversy on more than one occasion, but there's a story that remains largely untold. Helnwein: Two images I could not forget - the rape scene and the suicide of that girl in the bath tub - very startling and so different than anything you have ever seen about these subjects on film. There was a strange and sad beauty in the tardy, dreamlike movements of this girl with the expressionless face, slashing her wrists and slowly turning the water red. Theresa's acting, camera and music in that instant were one of the magic moments in cinema-history.

  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."

Nach 1945 trumpft die Kunst umfänglich erst wieder mit der 68er Bewegung schockierend auf. Etwa in der Pop-Art. Etwa mit den Bildtafeln eines Roy Lichtensteins. Seine Arbeiten, wie auch die anderer Pop-Artisten, tendieren indes zu einer Ästhetisierung des Schreckens. Zitatförmig nimmt Lichtenstein etwa Comic-Motive vom Krieg auf. Doch die Darstellung oszilliert zwischen Wohlgefallen an der Szenerie und Kritik an der Szenerie. Ähnlich ambivalent erscheinen die zahlreichen Drucke von Andy Warhol zum Thema "Kennedy-Mord". Der wirkliche Schrei, Signum einer Vorkriegsepoche, taucht nicht mehr auf. Ausnahme von der Regel sind die Werke von Gottfried Helnwein. Sie zielen nochmals auf die Scham- und Peinlichkeitsschwelle. Oder sie machen aus dem täglichen Schrecken im Fernsehen ein formatfüllendes Standbild, ("Das Wunder I", 1980, "Das Lied I", 1981).

Gottfried Helnwein's extensive 1997 retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg gave visitors an overview of his work going back to his street actions in Vienna in the 1970s, his grimacing iconic self-portraits that suggest self-mutilation, and on to his menacing canvases depicting the evils of the Third Reich. He has worked as a painter. draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor and performance artist. His work is consistently concerned with psychological anxiety. In his new series of paintings, done in somber monochrome blues, he continues to work with singulae sense of suspense and mystery.

"Kids and guns is a big issue in society today, especially in America," explains Helnwein," One aspect of these pictures refers to the Columbine High School shootings, when Manson was blamed. And now the whole country is going to war. America worships guns. Every day you hear of child abuse. There are these cases with the Roman Catholic church. We're living in a crazy society. I believe a true artist will always reflect the state society is in."

The visual focal point of the arts festival has to be Gottfried Helnwein's huge photographic images displayed on the streets of Kilkenny. Originally from Austria, Helnwein is now based in County Tipperary. His display of works on the streets of Kilkenny, and in Butler House, is testament to the power of this man's visual imagery. Helnwein's concerns could be viewed on a political level, indeed in his own homeland his work has been hounded by controversy, as he directly pinpoints neo-Nazi neuroses. 'Epiphany I: Adoration of the Magi' depicts a beautiful Madonna and Child being examined by Himmler's elite SS officers. This is strong stuff, with piercing connotations on the interaction of religion, politics and power in the 20th century. Juxtaposed with these images are a series of enlarged photographs of children's faces from Kilkenny. Hung in the same manner as billboard advertisements on buildings and walls, these photographs, with their silent, shut-eyed subjects, are meditative comments on life in the making.

If you are already familiar with Gottfried Helnwein then you proably knew more than I do about art, and I apologize on behalf of the commercially saturated masses. Helnwein is a ridiculously talented artist. That is basically all you need to know. Anything you could imagine art doing for you, or to you, any feeling it might instill in you or emotion it might remove from you, he captures, then cripples, reformats, and pastes into the cleft pallet of a 20-foot-tall gray-scale rendition of a deformed fetus soaking in formaldehyde. The essence of realism and ability that every art major ever clamored to grasp, he manages to expel onto canvas with apparent ease. He produces paintings, and photographs that you can't help but wish you could recreate with the same vision, depth, and intrigue. His art is without gimmick and his persona is without persona. Helnwein is simply someone who enjoys creating, and has been doing a pretty damn good job at it for 35 years.

"High above Marlene Dietrich Blvd. in the city of Berlin, the sun smoldered below the concrete gutter sky like a cigarette burn in a stained bedsheet. How Edgar Allen Poetic. We set forth to the Dome of Berlin at dusk and I felt like I was in my own painting, "The Death of Art." Helnwein and I created a living installation with two disabled nude women as families stopped their picnics to stare. Of course we documented this for future viewing. But it didn't begin there...

Spin: What is this "Grotesk Burlesk" thing you are doing in Los Angeles? Manson: That’s something I want to do in as many places as possible. We’re going to display collaborative work I’ve done with artist Gottfried Helnwein- large multimedia images. There is my painting. There are giant absinthe glasses with women inside them and conjoined twins and black elephants. Whatever I can find, really. And then there’s the music. I’m trying to leave people with a piece of my brain.

The Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein is well aware of the discomfort the public feels when confronted with images of children not represented as innocents but to whom a powerful sexual identity (and an awareness) is designated. In his work, and especially his paper drawings, he has created some of the most powerful and disturbing representations of abused childhood in history of art. We are not talking about the form of abuse commonly described in the penal code. By altering or removing the inbred pulsation that spurs us to stubbornly refuse or deny what we do not recognise, the manipulations and interferences (The Intrusion) adults perform on the social body of childhood are denounced.

Marilyn Manson's new Interscope album, "The Golden Age of Grotesque," arrives this week. The set, produced by Manson and Tim Skold, is led by the single "mOBSCENE." Says Manson, "This album is about expression. The imagination and personality of the individual cannot be trapped by small minds or defined by any one person. The genius of art finds sanctuary among children and madmen to survive. That, is who we are."

And what of the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"? Constance Bennett sang it in the 1933 musical version of the movie "Moulin Rouge." I don't think I've heard the song in 40 years. Jazz pianist and vocalist Diana Krall has a highly regarded revival in her 1995 "All for You" album. Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein used the title for his parody of Edward Hopper's 1942 painting "Nighthawks," substituting James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley for Hopper's isolated diner patrons. Krall told interviewer Vivien Goldman that when she was a kid she had a reproduction of Helnwein's painting on her wall.

Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's huge photorealist painting of a Pinocchio-like half boy/half puppet praying to a levitating vision of Donald Duck is fabulous -- Durer meets Disney.

No less eerie is Gottfried Helnwein's American Prayer, a painting of a boy praying, not to the God of the Bible, but to Donald Duck. A closer look reveals that his hands and other appendages have mechanical joints, so this child is really a marionette, a Pinocchio invoking the Disney deities.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland challenged renowned artists to make imaginary album covers for their favorite musicians. The exhibit, on display at the Rock Hall through the fall, includes cover art for everyone from Dylan to Tupac, the Kinks to Foo Fighters. Austrian multimedia artist Gottfried Helnwein worked with Manson to create this piece. "You can have many Interpretations of the relationship between Manson and the Child", says Helnwein. "I think the contrast is nice."

NYROCK: What were the reactions to the work you created together? Some of the photos are a bit unsettling.... MANSON: It was funny; we released some of the photos without commenting what they were or what we intended to do with them – if they were the cover for The Golden Age of Grotesque or not. Not even our record company knew what they were for. They assumed they were for the cover artwork and got quite angry, "What the fuck should we do with this cover?!?" So I told them not to worry about it; it's not the cover and showed them the one with the Mickey Mouse ears. It freaked them out even more. But that's how I deal with people who think they're the portraits of authority.

For me, the real highpoint of Conversations is the 1992 interview with Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian-born creative genius whom Donald Ault has justly called "One of the greatest conceptual artists of the past hundred years." His interview engages Barks in a spirit of imagination and play, and Barks responds to it: What if there were a real Duckworld? What would its layout be? If anyone can take this idea into the 21st century in current available media, it's Helnwein, whose surreal Duck portraits reveal a dark undercurrent probably always present to one degree or other in Barks's own work—Helnwein's ducks are surreal, haunting, yet strangely funny at the same time. A parody of the dark side of the comic, the work reminds one of Chris von Allsburg, WeeGee, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, others. And this is just where the influence is most obvious, in paintings of Donald Duck.

He and Helnwein created a series of controversial photographs, most of which were deemed by the label as too risque to be album art, including one of Manson dressed in Nazi regalia and clutching a gun as a young girl looks on.

Helnwein: "He's an icon that everyone on the planet would know. He's become a corporate identity. You look at Manson as Mickey Mouse, and it's the American dream turned into a nightmare." The Mickey portraits are only a small part of a larger collection of unnerving images that Manson will incorporate into his worldwide "Grotesk Burlesk" stage show. "The corporations, the media, they tell us to be shocked by images like these," Helnwein says. "Well, it's the world that's shocking to people like myself and Manson. There's no freedom. There's censorship. You're constantly being told how you should behave. What Manson and I have in common is the fact that we don't accept this. These images represent us fighting back."

Across the tiled runway, the living area displays three paintings with intentionally disturbing narratives. “They’re more complex,” she continues. “For my children to understand art, I needed some difficult pieces.” “American Prayer” – one of a half dozen paintings by Gottfried Helnwein, whom the couple discovered at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia – shows a boy with prosthetic arms praying to Donald Duck. “This Disneyland view of America symbolizes, to us, optimism for the future,” she says.

The following suicide notes were left by Japanese schoolchildren, aged ten to fifteen, who killed themselves within the last several years. Some of them met in suicide chat rooms, which are becoming increasingly popular in Japan. translated from the Japanese by Patrick Luhan.

Helnwein’s 20-by-60 foot outdoor installation “Modern Sleep 2003”, as well as photographs from his collaboration with Marilyn Manson, are included in the show, which opens with this evening’s gala and is open to the general public Friday through Sunday at Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar. “Modern Sleep 2003” (digital print) is the latest in a series dating back to the 1980s and reflects Helnwein’s use of children in questioning the human condition. It includes two images of a girl. In one, her skin is pale white, and she is dressed in black. In the other, she is black, dressed in white. In both images, her expression is death-like. “They have open eyes, so modern sleep doesn’t mean they are just sleeping,” says Helnwein. “It might mean something else.”

The bizarre and squirm-inducing self-representations of Austrian conceptual artist Gottfried Helnwein - the guy who likes to puncture his cheeks with surgical instruments - are so disturbing that municipal councils have sought to ban his work. But these are depictions of pain that make sense, given the intellectual and moral framework of Helnwein's personal and political past. The odd bureaucrat might question his motivations, only to be instantly shouted down by a chorus of art critics and intellectuals who can think of thousands of cogent, intelligent reasons why Helnwein's work matters. Still, the few members of the bod-mod community who actually talked to me took the moral high ground. Logic alone indicates that one person's Pamela Anderson is someone else's Lizard Man (Eric Sprague, a man who has, over the last few years, obsessively pursued his desire to become a human lizard via tattoos, teeth-filing, etc.) In a free society, the body's canvas is something an adult person should have complete mastery over.

That’s what attracted Gottfried Helnwein, a fine artist who created a Marilyn Manson cover. “There’s no record company involved to tell you all the things you can’t do,” said Helnwein, who collaborated with Manson for a cover that included a young girl loading a rifle. “There’s no commercial aspects, so you’re free. That’s the exciting thing. You can just create.” Helnwein knows something about artistic freedom. He shot the cover for Manson’s latest record, “The Golden Age of Grotesque” – a ghastly image of Manson in white and red face paint.

Austrian born artist Gottfried Helnwein's work is also of exemplary value, beginning with bandage action events (documented by the artist appearing in cafe's and lying in the street with his "wounded" head and face bandaged). His work depicts physical injuries which are metaphors for far deeper existential, psychological and human tragedies. Medical injuries, facial deformities and abused children proliferate throughout his work evoking primary internal anxieties. The inhumane acts of violence (child abuse, war atrocities, state oppression) and frightening images of familial estrangement that are presented in his work, constitute events which are preferred forgotten, like the nazi era, or preferred left unspoken such as familial traumas like child abuse. Helnwein also conducts a probing analysis of the individual and the self through an abundance of self portraits, each obscured by hideous facial bandages, his facial muscles, lips and eyes are stretched apart, torturingly, by varied medical instruments, now made famous by the Rammstein covers. All his images in some way evoke associations with mutilation, anguish or internal alienation. The works (frequently paintings appearing remarkably like photographs), boldly put forward social unacceptabilities never before portrayed so lucidly and so confrontingly. The many intensities produced in the work are profoundly disturbing, the impressions - uncomfortably eerie, electrocuting the eyes with a rush of haunting spatiality.

...Helnwein opens up"Nighthawks" to closer iconographic inspection, exposing the symbolic meanings of the painting to cement its position as a landmark of twentieth-century anti-urbanism.

COMIC RELEASE: NEGOTIATING IDENTITY FOR A NEW GENERATION The Regina Gouger Miller Gallery Carnegie Mellon University, Oakland Through March 21 . Mickey: So, uh, guys, it's a small world after all, don't ya think? . Spider-Man: Um, yes. I never really believed I'd ever be in a museum, sharing wall space with you, Donald Duck, or even really with Superman or that weird Ghost World guy. . Daniel Clowes: Hey, I'm right here. I can hear you perfectly well. And it's not just me; there are other alternative comics artists here, too, like Joe Sacco and Chris Ware. We can't believe our stuff is even on the wall, let alone alongside real artists like Barry McGee, Inka Essenhigh or Gottfried Helnwein. . Gottfried Helnwein: Yes, it's quite a mix. I'm not sure what I think about it. After all, I borrow imagery from comics, and I really appreciate the do-it-yourself ethic of 'zine editors...but still, I am a painter and my paintings really do belong in a museum. You guys belong in books, in comic book stores. . This fictional dialogue isn't too far-fetched from the one that the curators of Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation hope visitors will engage in when they visit the show. Curators Vicky A. Clark, Barbara Bloemink, Ana Merino and Rick Gribenas know that this smart and intriguing collection of comics, both mainstream and alternative, 'zines and fine art is about dialogue in more ways than one.

Outside the Osbournes’ mansion last week, Manson and modernist Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein premiered two paintings from a collection that will be used as The Golden Age Of Grotesque’s artwork and will travel with the singer. Inspired by the glamour of 1930s Hollywood, the grotesque of vaudeville and the erotic art movement in Weimar Berlin, the pieces are disturbing portraits of Manson wearing the classic Mickey Mouse ears hat. "This is an image of innocence and an image of childish nightmares," Manson explained. "This is, to me, growing up in America, what I saw in entertainment and the contrasting extremes of beauty and ugliness.

Next season's highlight may be a Der Rosenkavalier directed by Maximilian Schell and designed by Downtown artist Gottfried Helnwein, and including sopranos Adrianne Pieczonka and Elizabeth Futral.

"The world doesn't like people that are different than the average. Rulers throughout history have always hated those people that stick out of the masses, - the geniuses, the poets, monsters, artists, witches and saints; and usually they burned them or put them in dungeons, concentration-camps or mental institutions, thinking of what a nice and peaceful slave-camp this planet could be without them. But for some miraculous reason this desert-town here seems to be different than the rest of the world, because here they don't mind these monsters, they actually seem to like them. L.A. is the sanctuary for people with weird visions and impossible dreams. Maybe it's the last place on earth where dreams are still legal."

Donald Duck was his first, Elvis Presley his second "revelation". Gottfried Helnwein reveals how he became what he now is: a partisan of anti-culture. The painter of stark, often provocative pictures was interviewed by Andreas Maeckler. The result is exciting to read from beginning to end. Helnwein expresses himself in an outspoken and direct manner, without letting himself be drawn into profound theories. It is interesting to note that he confesses not to be able to say why he paints a picture. "I have never met an artist who thinks about this while he is working. And whenever he does comment about this, he must be lying."

THE streets of the ancient county city of Kilkenny become a vast open air art gallery during this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival as the provocative work of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein hangs his vast photo-realist paintings from buildings large and small including the metropolis's towering castle. Helnwein's work, which has even led to government resignations in his native land, examines the ambivalence and hypocrisy with which unpleasant truths about the past are now viewed by society.

(Illustrated Books). Publishers Weekly; January 27, 2003 ... paintings of Braque, Dali and Degas, and even an occasional piece of sculpture. Baudelaire's "Giantess" mirrors Gottfried Helnwein' s Lulu, a giantess in garters--other juxtapositions are more of an artistic stretch. As a stimulus to sexual reflection ...

... companies: Among others, Joel-Peter Witkin's repugnant, prosthetic-clad Dominatrice, from 1988, is here, as is Gottfried Helnwein's barbaric 1987 Self-Portrait, depicting his own torture with surgical tools. By exploring the simpler technique ...

famed for his confronting paintings, Helnwein is as incisive with the camera as with the brush, as this portraits from the 80s attest.

"Kleines Helnwein" is a play written and directedby the Argentinian poet Rodrigo M. Malmsten. Inspired and based on the early paintings of Gottfried Helnwein First performance: Teatro San Martin, Buenos Aires, 2000 . Autor: Rodrigo M. Malmsten Actuan: Martín Von Tumpling, Belén Blanco Iluminación: Alejandro Le Roux Música: Mariano Durand, Marcelo Vignolo Producción: Julieta Almada Dirección: Rodrigo M. Malmsten Esta obra formó parte del evento: III Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires

Continuing the theme of documenting the landscape, internationally renowned artist Goffried Helnwein will exhibit a number of large-scale photo-realist canvases depicting Irish landscapes. Helnwein lives for much of the year in Co. Tipperary and his paintings illustrate the drama and the beauty of the countryside as well as revealing the changing landscape of Ireland. Helnwein, (born in Vienna in 1948), is a formidable artist and his work has often been proved controversial, because they function as moral probes. He continually reveals emotive issues within his work practice.

The Russian Museum's Marble Palace is showcasing over 100 of the artist's paintings, drawings, photos and sculptures for the next two and a half months, allowing St. Petersburgers to experience for themselves what the museum's curator, Alexander Barovsky, calls Helnwein's "unique combination of strong radicalism with Pop-Art."

Like Sylvia Plath, artist Gottfried Helnwein has a near-schizoid attitude toward Germany's National Socialists, producing images of that period ranging from the truly horrible to those bordering on an eerie reverence. Here his work Epiphany I, Adoration of the Magi (1996), in which the central female figure has a Plath-like intensity.

The common or garden tie doesn't tend to throw up too many fashion conundrums for the casual wearer. The options are pretty simple; classic and understated or loud and hey, wacky! But not anymore: thanks to London-based fashion terrorists, Cultural Ties, all that is about to change with a range of neckties, featuring specially commissioned work from over 80 contemporary artists. Now the sartorially discerning can choose from pink bunnies (Jeff Koons), naked ladies (Paola Gandolfi), amorphous freaks (Gottfried Helnwein) and satanic messages (David Shrigley) to mention a few.

...and especially by opening up the discussion to a powerfully engagé photo-realist like Helnwein, 'image and Enigma' proposes further possibilities and more intricate relationships, demonstrating that the energy of the enigmatic image has suffused yet more widely through current artistic practice. from the unsettled unsettling times we live in, could we expect anything less? And could anything less than a lucid, concentrated collection of such work make the point as urgent as our times require?

An urban oasis — The California Palace of the Legion of Honor is San Francisco's most seductively situated museum From July 31-Nov. 28, the museum will present paintings, drawings and photographs by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. The exhibit, titled "The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein," looks at children as innocent, yet exploited.

His show "The Child," at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, comes with the equivalent of a PG-13 rating, for pieces that feature children and themes of emotional and physical pain. He finds the warning ironic, given that the gallery next door is full of Renaissance paintings depicting religious beheadings and stabbings, but has no warnings about violent content. He knows that his paintings are disturbing ("I'm very bad for people who want decoration," he laughs) He theorizes that entertainment today is passive, but his art causes people to think and "co-create" to fill in the blanks. "Any civil society needs provocation and I think the artist, the role of the artist, is also to provoke and challenge people, because every society usually wants to hold on to the status quo,'' he said. "True artists challenge reality. You don't accept it. We want the world different."

...the work is extremely ambitious, both in terms of scale and rendering - some paintings are seven metres long and all are so realistic that they are nearly indistinguishable from photographs. Consequently they cannot fail but to strike a chord, as you marvel at the skill involved in creating such vivid and realistic landscape views. So much so that Fáilte Ireland is surely gaining free advertising, as many will be inspired to venture out and experience these places first hand. Helnwein re-creates theses vistas using a composite of photographic sources which cram multiple focal points into a single view. The surfaces are absolutely flawless with practically no evidence of the artist's brushwork. Studying the surface is absorbing, as the viewer is immersed in the detail as much as seductive wider views of the vast, undulating topography.

Adding To The Discussion Gottfried Helnwein is an artist whose work - "giant color portraits of stillborn babies, paintings that merge Nazi-archive photographs with pictures Helnwein has taken, enigmatic portrayals of apparently wounded or menaced children" - tends to provoke strong reactions, and in recent years, several individuals have expressed their displeasure with some of his images by defacing them. Helnwein confesses to being initially startled by the vandalism, but these days, he has decided that the viewer has as much to contribute to the larger discussion as the artist, and if people are moved to destroy what he has created, he can at least salute their passion.

Helnwein's first-ever solo American museum exhibition features paintings, drawings, watercolors and photographs by the Austrian artist famous for his disturbing yet compelling portraits of injured children, whose images he uses to represent innocence lost.

Almost 'autobiographical landscapes', the paintings in this exhibition by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein broadly outline the migrations he, and his family, have made from his native Vienna, through Germany, to America and Ireland, his family home since 1997. Yet these landscapes also mark a return to his earliest artistic inspiration. Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes are unashamedly aesthetic and the typically epic, but not inhuman scale, imitates the subject matter with each painting seeming to breathe a sense of a year well advanced, after the effusive growth and floral displays of May. Sunset beckons here and with it, Romanticism.

Visitors to Gottfried Helnwein's show of panoramic landscapes at the Crawford Municipial Gallery in Cork are having trouble deceiding either they are looking at paintings or photographs. Some are up to seven metres in length, by two metres wide: a breathtaking, epic scale. They are extraordinarily beautiful, by any standards, and, yes, they are paintings. The finish may be photorealist, but these are not direct transcriptions of what the camera lens sees; they are edited and informed by the artist's eye. Take a close look at Irish Landscape III (Nire Valley) or Irish Landscape IV (County Waterford). Nor do they represent what the naked eye can see. American Landscape (Death Valley) is so wide that it has an almost vertiginous effect. Dawn Williams who curated this show has done a superb job.

From 3 July to 4 September Gottfried Helnwein exhibits some of his large photo-realist landscapes. These really are BIG paintings, with some of the canvases reaching seven metres in length. So what, you may yawn, but the work has to be seen to be believed. Helnwein specialises in the classic, dramatic sublime and, not surprisingly, Caspar David Friedrich is cited as an influence.

A SPECTACULAR Exhibition which includes Irish Landscapes by an internationally renowned Austrian Artist is causing a stir at the Crawford Municipial Art Gallery in Cork.

The film tells the story of famed Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, obsessed with a mission to use his art to preserve the memory of Holocaust persecutions.

In the film "Ninth November Night," painter Gottfried Helnwein describes his first encounter with Jewish people during his childhood in Austria after the war, a bleak and dark period, one, he says, with no singing, no laughter. He was nine years old when he saw the two people walking down the street, very close together, walking quickly, looking down the whole time. Helnwein became intrigued and wanted to know who they were. He asked everyone, all the adults, "Who are they?" But no one wanted to answer. Finally, someone said the word, one that he remembers the person had great difficulty saying - "Jews."

Look at his inexplicably damaged children, often painted in a midnight monochrome, and you can't help but try to fill in the story, and take a degree of responsibility. Helnwein's work is what the art world likes to call "difficult, "often as an excuse to look the other way.

Marilyn Manson: "Gottfried Helnwein whom I collaborated with a lot invited us to get married at one of his castles in either Germany or Ireland," Manson said. "So we thought we would just have the pageantry and the ceremony of a normal wedding, but without the church. Because I don't think that I would really be welcome there."

"The Child," at the Legion of Honor (www.thinker.org), is a less lyrical experience that confronts the way that the world so glibly uses children (in advertising, in war, in religion) to achieve less-than-innocent objectives. Some of Helnwein's paintings are terrifying. Instead of poster-child perfection, we're presented with children with various deformities: wayward eyelids, lumpy defects, hideous extra folds of flesh. Then there's Helnwein's penchant for contrasting childlike innocence with the horrors of the Third Reich. In one piece, a woman with a naked infant son, in the classic pose of the Madonna, basks in the soft-focus gaze of five men dressed in Nazi uniforms. Thought-provoking? Very. Disturbing? You bet. Children are our sacred cows. But they grow up. In that way, they are miniature adults. Sometimes art can push us in ways that shake the status quo.

Q:How can you explain the artistic cruelty of your cover art works? Why is there so much pain and suffering on them? Where is the border between art and cruelty? . A:We like to arise controversies and that is why already on the second album we decided to choose the photographs of Helnwein for our cover artwork. We really like his attitude towards art and the way he showed us. It turned out that a band picture can be something different, a real art, and not just another common, boring shot of a few people.

Any artist who sites Donald Duck and Jesus Christ as the most important influences in their art must be worth taking a look at. In the row of pristine gallery fronts in London's Cork street, you cannot miss Gottfried Helnwein's show; it's the one with the gigantic Mickey Mouse staring out at you. The Robert Sandelson Gallery has given us a stunning show of the infamous, Austrian born artist's recent work. Helnwein is on a mission to find the answers to questions that no-one in Austria would give him; such as why the post-war republic portrayed itself as a victim rather than as one of the first main perpetrators of Nazism.

"Ninth November Night," the Holocaust remembrance documentary which debuted in Malibu last August in its New Malilbu Theatre engagement to qualify for Academy Award consideration, will be a featured entry in the AFI Film Festival Saturday (Nov. 13) and Sunday (Nov. 14.) Produced by Malibu artist and curator Gisela Guttman with director/composer Henning Lohner, the film concerns Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's lifelong dedication to artworks perpetuating awareness of Holocaust attrocities. The documentary recently was a prize-winner at the Ojai Film Festival and is invited to the Nagoya Film Festival to be held next June as part of the World Expo in Japan as well as to the Calgary (Canada) Festival which honors films of humanitarian outreach.

"Ninth November Night" documents Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's sprawling 1988 art installation recalling the horrors of the Holocaust -- and the exhibit's defacement by vandals shortly after it was unveiled. Directed by Henning Lohner and featuring on-camera appearances by Helnwein collectors Sean Penn and Jason Lee, the documentary short is largely the product of the passion and persistence of Malibu producer Gisela Guttman. When she struggled to find a venue in Los Angeles willing to show Helnwein's large-scale installation, she decided to make a documentary instead. The art installation, which revolves around a series of pictures of small children, was vandalized after its initial showing in Germany. "The one thing I wanted to do is just be sure that people can see the entire installation, I just really wanted to bring it to Los Angeles, no matter how," Guttman said. "The power of those images really comes across on-screen, and that's what I wanted people to see and to think about."

While tracking down alligators, Mr. Penn discusses the state of affairs in Hollywood and Washington.

"... I believe the cure for any depression is expression in your heart, and Gottfried Helnwein was one of the most supportive people towards me. He was the one who gave me that advice, and he was correct with it. 'Personal Jesus' says everything that I would say if I were to write a song right now. I was listening to it on a CD I just bought because I wanted to really take a step away from the world. I wasn't sure if I was going to put out a 'best of' or if I was going to do anything in general with music, because there's a frustration level that the more commercial you are, the more marginal you are - also, the lack of art that exists in entertainment, and the lack of interest. People are much more content with watching The Real World and reality television, than living their own lives, or watching something that comes from imagination. You know what it is? It's not even Bush's fault. It's America making itself the Third Reich. Imagination is a necessity, and I don't think it's sort of bad. I can dream up some image like I did with Helnwein, and they're "bad," they're forbidden, but I can take an image that's far worse, that's on CNN and it's reality. So we can't get censored. It's the real world. But that's a bad message to send to kids growing up, I think. ('The Golden Age of Grotesque':) ...I was not allowed to put the paintings on the cover of the record! Our anticipation was not to create album artwork. We wanted to collaborate and create something together, and we did not consider the Golden Age of Grotesque to be limited to an album. ...All I can say about it is I'm glad that it makes it into the collection of images that represent me as best as it could. I think that it just scratches the surface of what Gottfried and I could do together" Marilyn Manson Los Angeles, July 2004

These are the images of a man consumed by free will. A man with a gift and a craft and a passion to challenge the mediocrity of what has already been established. A man whose opinions embody everything authority does not want you to believe in. His name is Gottfried Helnwein, and he recently discussed his 30+ year career with Tastes Like Chicken's Insane Wayne Chingsang.

Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibit titled The Child at San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor testifies that the past cannot be erased from the minds of those who had lived through it, not even from the consciousness of those yet to be born: Helnwein was born three years after the death of Hitler, and yet his watercolor painting depicting the "Fuhrer" with two little girls in white dresses communicates not only sarcasm but horror and revulsion. For Hitler is not the painting’s main subject but rather these girls that have already undergone a dehumanizing initiation, these children whose gaze makes their parents shrink. What you will see in the halls of the Legion of Honor will make you shudder. Undoubtedly, Helnwein anticipates that reaction, and, yes, he deliberately makes you go through this ordeal, but just as undoubtedly (and therein lies his strength) Gottfried Helnwein puts himself through the same ordeal.

TEMPE, ARIZONA.- The Arizona State University Art Museum will present The Other Mainstream: Selections from the Collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn, January 22 - April 23, 2005. A dynamic selection of works from the collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn, "The Other Mainstream" shows their ongoing commitment to social and political issues and artists of color.

...On the other hand, two large faces - Gottfried Helnwein's Head of a Child and Richard Phillips' Brandbild (Sunburn) - hold our gaze, as they gaze at us, though I'm not sure just what they say about that state between whatever and whatever, be it heaven and hell, action and inaction, or plain old fretful stasis.

In November, America celebrated the 75th birthday of Mickey Mouse. In his long history, the world�s most famous rodent has not always lived up to his squeaky-clean image. As the following timeline makes clear, over the decades Mickey has been involved in a host of unsavory activities and turned up in all sorts of surprising and sometimes scandalous places. Mickey Mouse is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a pair of red shorts with yellow buttons... February 2003: Outside Ozzy Osbourne's Beverly Hills mansion, shock rocker Marilyn Manson and modernist Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein premiere two paintings that will be used as the artwork for Mansons album The Golden Age of Grotesque. The creepy images depict a heavily made-up Manson wearing Mouseketeer ears.

MADRID, SPAIN. - This is the biggest ever exhibition devoted to the life of the ultimate screen icon, Marilyn Monroe - Life of a Legend. Showcasing more than 250 works from over 70 famous artists and renowned photographers. As a tribute to her lasting popularity this extraordinary exhibition charts every stage of the bittersweet story of Monroe's life and career. Works on display include well-known pieces by renowned artists such as Andy Warhol, Allan Jones, Peter Blake, Richard Avedon, Gottfried Helnwein and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as previously unseen works by Conny Holthusen, Antonio de Felipe, José de Guimares and Ernesto Tatafiore.

In 1980, Modernism became the first gallery on the West Coast to show Russian avant-garde art, and is one of only two galleries in the nation that continue to exhibit such works today. Muller, through gallery shows, has helped build the careers of American realist painter John Register, sociopolitical conceptual artist Gottfried Helnwein, social portraitist Robert Crumb and narrative painter Mark Stock, to name a few. Muller has also helped with exhibitions at Bay Area museums such as Helnwein's challenging show, "The Child," the Palace of the Legion of Honor last August.

Austrian artist Gottfriend Helnwein's large mixed media portrait of a little girl faces the gallery's entrance. The press release states, "[Helnwein's] images intend to evoke associations with mutilation, anguish or internal alienation ... his paintings blatantly put forward images that border the line of social unacceptability and comment on the results of post Second World War society."

Austrian artist Gottfired Helnwein's powerful and haunting paintings provide a disturbing commentary on Nazism and the Holocaust, regularly provoking outraged reactions from right-wingers in his native land and in Germany. "I was amazed how much pictures could reach into the hearts and minds of people - and how much they would talk to me about it," he told the JC. "For me, art is like a dialogue. My art is not giving answers, it is asking questions."

Cover: Portrait by Gottfried Helnwein

Viennese painter Gottfried Helnwein, who specializes in exaggerated expressions, was brought to the U.S. to photograph "the typically American look" art-director Hoglund desired. Hoglund's assistants Dorothy Chapman and Charlotte Quiggle rounded up a dozen TIME staffers to pose for preliminary photographs. "The final painting was a composite based mainly on Associate Editor Jim Kelly," Hoglund says. Kelly thinks the honor "dubious".

"I don't spend money on coke or whores." deadpans Kevin Smith. "And I am not a big car guy with a fleet of Ferraris or anything like that. But I can get behind an indulgence like this." The indulgence in question is towering a nine-foot-tall canvas of Smith's daughter, Harley, which hangs in the entry of his Hollywood home. Smith commissioned the portrait two years ago from Austrian Artist Gottfried Helnwein, who is best known for his dark, noir-style paintings. Smith admittedly wept when he finally received the work, which has since become his pride and joy - a family heirloom that is a testament to his love for his child as well as being a serious work of art.

Master of the grotesque, this shock artist has convulsed European society with his portraits of emotional violence His portraits reveal characters convulsed by powerful feelings. The uneasy, spastic potency of their emotions leaves us unsure whether they are laughing or crying, in pain or ecstasy. Whatever the interpretation, one cannot fail to notice that Helnwein delivers a powerful Heimlich maneuver to the solar plexus of our times.

During Monday’s first “Rosenkavalier” rehearsal with director Max Schell, Edgar Baitzel artistic director assured me a production by the L.A. Opera would always be “of the highest taste,” but the ad by production designer Gottfried Helnwein would give potential audiences “something to think about.”

In Richard Strauss' opera, aging aristocrat Marschallin beds the young Octavian. But Octavian's a mezzo-soprano, played by a lady in what opera calls a "trouser role." Helnwein just took the trousers out. In the ad, the women's expressions are tender and their lips mere millimeters apart. Helnwein isn't surprised by the scuttlebutt in the normally staid opera world. "I'm used to it," Helnwein said. "It always happens with my work. I don't intend it really, but it happens. I think it has to do with the fact that middle class people usually don't want anything to change. If it could, everything would freeze and stay the same way forever. But artists are very annoying, disturbing guys. They always want to change and mess something up.

For the last several months, Downtown-based artist Gottfried Helnwein has switched back and forth between two realities. In his Arts District studio, he works on material to fill gallery and museum shows booked into 2008, all over the world. Then he steps out into the sunlight, chats in several languages to several friends at a coffee shop on Traction Avenue, and walks to the Los Angeles Opera's costume shop on Alameda Street. Here, he oversees the costumes and sets for Der Rosenkavalier, which opens May 29 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Schell's collaborators are conductor Kent Nagano and artist Gottfried Helnwein, whose décors mingle contemporary elements — there's an office chair on rollers that the oafish Baron Ochs uses to skitter around in — with the Baroque and Rococo earmarks of the era in which the opera is set, the reign of Maria Theresa. Even before the opening, however, this collaboration has created something of a stir. Helnwein's eye-catching poster features a close-up of two gorgeous bare-shouldered women just barely kissing — which, technically, captures the opening love scene between the Marschallin and the young nobleman she's involved with, Octavian, who in time-honored "trouser" fashion is played by a mezzo-soprano. "I was trying to get to the work's essence," says Helnwein, now an Angeleno relocated from Vienna. "Two beautiful young people in a tender, magical love scene." But the photo illustration also suggests "lipstick lesbians" — not exactly what Strauss and Hofmannsthal had in mind.

Gottfried Helnwein arouses creative tumult. - Los Angeles Times

Visuals that can overpower the delicate text and even occasionally seem at odds with the glittery, enrapturing music but that nonetheless are strikingly provocative in a museum-installation kind of way. Call the look postmodern Baroque, a kind of cool Fellini-esque phantasmagoria, done as artsy chic and maximized by Alan Burrett’s ingenious lighting. The outer acts have a single-hue, ghostly wash, with one or several of the central characters in blazing color from head to toe as stark contrast. The second act is a peachy gold, no spectral downside. Yes, it will offend the traditionalists – those who look for straightforward 18th-century effects.

Along with direction by cinema great Maximilian Schell, this original go at Richard Strauss’ opera of the young rose-bearer was designed by Viennese visual virtuoso Gottfried Helnwein. The team has created a surrealist environment undefined by any specific time or place. Visually, characters range from over the top froo-froo to contemporary, with nightmarish interpretations of Venetian masqueraders and creeping minions of the lecherous Lerchenau in between. Each act is bathed in its own primary color suited to the general feeling as if you’re watching through a giant mood ring.

Born in Vienna in 1948, Gottfried Helnwein has developed a very powerful and idiosyncratic visual vocabulary reflected in his masterful use of multiple media (painting, drawing, photography, performance, and stage design). Helnwein addresses a broad range of social and political issues, resulting in challenging and provocative artworks. Although at times very disturbing, these works are consistently moving, and seek spiritual beauty often approaching the transcendental.

The 21st century artist Gottfried Helnwein has succeeded for many of the same reasons as Strauss, and you would think he'd be the perfect man to design new sets and costumes for Rosenkavalier. In his Downtown Los Angeles studio, Helnwein paints photorealistic portraits of beautiful women, innocent children and Irish landscapes, then undercuts it with grotesque images of the damaged and the misbegotten. His theater design follows the same lead. Like Strauss, Helnwein's art is strangely populist at the same time it revels in morbid undertones. The marriage is a happy one: Helnwein plays with a monochromatic canvas (each act has its own color, including face paint); has fun with big, cartoonish Alice-in-Wonderland costumes; and does sometimes hint at the decadent underbelly of the work.

... a visual rewrite of a work so encrusted in a much-observed tradition that you’d think the slightest new move might upset the balance. But no, from the opening in a bedroom furnished not in period fustian but in bare walls magically drenched in Alan Burrett’s saturated lighting, to the glorious overstatement of the look of the Baron himself, who seems costumed in neon, to the Marschallin’s final entrance, when the flush of her face seems to have drained into the unsexed blue of her gown, this is a story told in color and transformed — by the design genius of Gottfried Helnwein — into a Rosenkavalier freshly renewed.

The von Faninal Palace set for Act II was an absolutely astounding use of space. Almost all of the characters entered from the sides of the stage, at least two stories high. They descended to ground level by use of a two huge curved staircases which come together at the top. All around on the second floor is a chest high balustrade and the entire structure is supported by a series of columns which go through the second floor and continue upwards from there. The structure was in white, but lighting designer Alan Burrett bathed the entire scene in a “daylight” type gel. Because of the elaborateness of the set for Act II (and the time required to “build” it and then break it down again), the sets for Acts I and III were the same, merely a big box, dressed differently. It is a brilliant concept.

The Times: "...these photo-paintings appear even more real than a photograph: they are hyper-real, super-saturated depictions of the world that surrounds us, as we would like to see it. Helnwein’s landscapes offer us the world as we see it in our mind’s eye, our memories. What is certain is that with these works Helnwein has raised the bar for artists to come with art that is groundbreaking in terms of scale, skill and vision. Painted mountains, fields and sky can never be the same again."

Winging in from far-off and far-out corners of the world: German artist Gottfried Helnwein (here for the opening of "Modern Sleep'' at Modernism Gallery); actress Winona Ryder, who'd just landed at SFO from La-La land; and from the Gold Coast, Ann Getty and Jo Schuman Silver, popping by after a trunk show Ann hosted for Alyssa Boothby's Cracquer Jacque jewelry.

A blonde Madonna, dressed as if she were spending an evening at the opera, presents her child to the watchful eyes of Nazi SS Guards, One officer looks as if he were studying the child's genitals, perhaps to see whether he has been circumcised. Dark hair parted severely to one side and fleshy baby cheeks lending a slight and comical hangdog expression, the young child presents something of an eerie resemblance to the Führer.

She loved to entertain and frequently opened her home to host international artists, including Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein and Spanish-Argentine mezzo soprano Marisa Martins. "She was the most wonderful light for all of us," said painter Ira Yeager. "It's such a loss -- for both the valley and the city." Martin Muller, owner of Modernism Gallery in San Francisco and the American dealer for Gottfried Helnwein, said she was "one of the rare, truly genuine, creative souls who happened to be a part of high society. She was nurturing to artists, notably Gottfried. She was always bringing creative people together. Erika was a bohemian with sparkle."

Austrian-born and educated and now living Los Angeles, Helnwein employs a hyperrealist manner that will remind Americans of Gerhard Richter but, if anything, works to opposite effect. Rather than re-confirm post-modernist cynicism, Helnwein rekindles post-war anguish. This selection, going back more than three decades, emphasizes his preoccupation with the image of the child, from early Nitsch- and Schwarzkogler-influenced photo-actions (with the requisite bandages) to recent large portrait-like heads and depictions of Christ-child-like babes attracting odd, menacing crowds. A perverse streak runs through the images, but it’s not pederasty: tinged with surrealism, it’s an enduring shame and anger at the Nazi past – and the artist’s suspicion that Naziism hasn’t been eradicated.

The LAO's compelling new production of Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier" bears the intriguing vision of Hollywood legend, actor/director Maximilian Schell, and the marvellous designs of Austrian-born, Los Angeles-based visual artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein's brilliant costumes are also character driven. Sophie's duenna Marianne (soprano Susan Foster) is garbed like a Shakespearean nurse, Sophie is an idealized Helen of Troy, while the schemers Valzacchi and Annina (tenor Anthony Laciura and mezzo-soprano Margaret Thompson) could be straight out of Mozart's "Don Giovanni'. In short a production that clearly needs to be visited again and again to fully reveal its symbolic and metaphoric riches. Perhaps the greatest glory of this "Der Rosenkavalier" is its visual unpredictability.

Beginning November 3 the gallery showcases recent paintings by Gottfried Helnwein. A Swiss-born artist whose work spans a broad spectrum of media, Helnwein was strongly influenced by the dark, devastated world he perceived as a child in post–World War II Europe. His imagery is haunting and his draftsmanship impeccable, inviting a closer look in spite of often chilling subject matter. Helwein’s paintings will remain on view through December 23.

If you fondly recall the Gottfried Helnwein self-portrait used as the cover of a Scorpions album, then you'll likely enjoy the Disney-dropping message of the artist's mixed media work American Prayer, and you'll probably even forgive the misspelling of his name on the nearby title card. After all, what evocation of comic-book history would be complete without a typo or two, and who's got time to read text, anyway, when there are such vibrantly graphic treasures as Michael Ray Charles' painting (Forever Free) Beware and the Reed Anderson/Daniel Davidson video "Macho Shogun" to enjoy looking at?

Manson also said he's launching an art movement called the Celebritarian Corporation. While he wouldn't discuss it in detail, he did allow that Celebritarian has been incubating for seven years and that "it represents the only place where art can possibly go after surrealism and Dada. There's an array of people involved — from Gottfried Helnwein, who is a fine artist, to Steven Klein, who is a fashion photographer, and Anthony Silva, a director and an editor. I think it's probably the only valid attempt at an art movement since the surrealists. It's something that should be feared, but it's something I can't imagine not living up to its expectations.

(LITTLE ROCK, AR) – The Arkansas Arts Center presents the fourth event of the à la cARTe fundraising party series in honor of the contentious artist Gottfried Helnwein on November 17, 2005. Coordinated by the Arkansas Arts Center Young Patrons, the à la cARTe series is comprised of five parties, each celebrating one of five eccentric and important artists – Andy Warhol, Dale Chihuly, Vincent Van Gogh, Gottfried Helnwein and Diego Rivera.

In one large painting, a girl sits on the edge of a bed in a barren room, staring into space. A giant blue rabbit with sightless insect eyes stands before her, clad in some sort of military garb. Despite their proximity, the two figures seem to occupy different dimensions. The frightful effect of the rabbit figure appears to register more in us than in the child whose vision we may be spying on. The vaguely erotic menace of the rabbit figure flares in another untitled picture in which a sort of Mad Hatter figure, all in yellow and masked, leans in to touch a sleeping girl with a gloved hand. For all the pictures' realism and their echoes of Lewis Carroll, they evoke psychological rather than literal monstrosity: the betrayal of innocence by imagination as well as reality.

Mod Squad: Gallerist Martin Muller promised, and delivered, a colorful evening celebrating "New Paintings," the latest exhibition by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, at Modernism. Especially if you're seated between Helnwein and his friend-collector Marilyn Manson at Muller's Modernism West annex for a postshow repast created by the artisans of Foreign Cinema. But Helnwein and Manson are fascinating, articulate men who happen to create uncomfortable art.

The show sets out the main evidence for its claim in a multimedia exhibit planted squarely in the middle of the exhibition space. A half- hour presentation compares Hopper's work with film stills and clips, photographs and canvasses by other painters. Audiences gasp at some of the juxtapositions - for example, Nighthawks with Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Gottfried Helnwein's popular spoof poster, and the diner scene in Herbert Ross's Hollywood version of Pennies from Heaven. The visual rhymes are unmistakable.

The 24-hour city is already a reality for art-lover Lou Reed. Reed was dining with a friend - the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein - on Sunday night, when he decided he wanted to see Helnwein's new show at the Robert Sandelson Gallery. "I had just taken to my bed when I got a phone call from Gottfried", says Sandelson. "But I'm an old fan of Lou Reed so I went as I was and opened up at midnight." For nearly an hour, Sandelson stood in his nightwear and "yawned away while they analysed the pictures in detail".

SHOCK rocker Marilyn Manson flew into Ireland last night to tie the knot with burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese in a gothic fairytale wedding. The 36-year-old singer - real name Brian Warner - wed at Gurteen Le Poer Castle, County Tipperary, after arriving in secret. The lavish pad is owned by his German artist pal Gottfried Helnwein, who is notorious for dark artworks.

Rocker Marilyn Manson married his longtime girlfriend, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, on Saturday in front of some 60 guests as fans and well wishers gathered outside, PEOPLE has learned. The ceremony took place in Tipperary, Ireland, at Castle de La Poer, the home of the couple's friend, artist Gottfried Helnwein. Contrary to rumors that the pair would exchange their blood during the ceremony, they actually traded vows they wrote for each other.

Shock-rocker Marilyn Manson tied the knot with his burlesque bride Dita Von Teese in a secret ceremony in Tipperary last night. The couple exchanged vows after dark at a private ceremony in the home of their artist friend Gottfried Helnwein. The stately Irish castle where Helnwein lives with his family was transformed into a gothic fortress as pals including Lisa Marie Presley, Johnny Depp, Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie arrived for the event. As darkness fell, former stripper Dita, 32, walked through the gothic arches of the castle's Great Hall to the sound of a harp - dressed in a stunning gown designed by Vivienne Westwood and corset expert Mr. Pearl.

London - You'd expect Marilyn Manson's wedding to be a headline-grabbing, shock gothic circus of an event. Instead, his wedding to girlfriend Dita Von Teese was a fairytale set in an Irish castle - although he couldn't resist wearing black. Some 60 guests, including Lisa Marie Presley, attended the bash at Castle Gurteen in County Tipperary - home of the Mansons' friend, artist Gottfried Helnwein. Marilyn wore a John Galliano-designed black silk taffeta tux, and Dita a purple taffeta Vivienne Westwood gown with train, petticoats, a tricorn hat and a corset - what else from a burlesque performer?

The shock rocker and his new bride, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, tied the knot Saturday in Kilsheelan, County Tipperary, Ireland, before 60 guests, including Lisa Marie Presley and CSI's Eric Szmanda, People magazine reported. The nondenominational ceremony was performed at Castle Gurteen, the home of the couple's friend, artist Gottfried Helnwein. Despite rumors suggesting the couple planned to exchange vials of their blood during the service, they merely swapped vows they had written for each other.

Rocker Marilyn Manson married his longtime girlfriend, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, on Saturday in front of some 60 guests as fans and well wishers gathered outside. The ceremony took place in County Tipperary, Ireland, at Castle Gurteen de La Poer, the home of the couple's friend, artist Gottfried Helnwein. Contrary to rumors that the pair would exchange their blood during the ceremony, they actually traded vows they wrote for each other.

SHOCK rocker Marilyn Manson has got hitched to long-time girlfriend, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese Marilyn, whose real name is Brian Warner , wed Dita, a.k.a. Heather Sweet, on Saturday at Castle de La Poer County Tipperary , Ireland. The multi-day event at the home of the couple's friend, controversial Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, included a ceremony in front of around 60 guests performed by Marilyn's friend, Chilean underground film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Some of the world's most renowned horror writers have been Irish so we suppose there must be something spooky about this fair land when the lights go out? Marilyn chose Gottfried Helnwein’s Castle Gurteen Le Poer in Co. Tipperary to exchange vows with his blushing bride.

In one Gottfried Helnwein painting, a child sits slumped at the foot of her bed, her expression strangely blank given the other figure in the bare room — a ghostly, uniformed bunny standing at attention like something out of a nightmarish Nutcracker (or, given the rabbit’s creepy saucer-wide eyes, Donnie Darko). In another, the girl dozes as a Mad Hatter–ish beast, outfitted entirely in yellow, reaches out to scoop her up. Although children wounded both physically and psychologically have appeared in Helnwein's work since the early '70s - earning him no small measure of controversy..

Dita and Manson were married Dec. 3 in the Irish castle of their friend, Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. She wore a purple Vivienne Westwood gown and tricorn hat by Stephen Jones; he wore a black taffeta and velvet tuxedo by John Galliano. Guests were invited to participate in skeet shooting, archery and falconry in the days after the wedding.

DVT: I'm in London. Manson and I got married last weekend in Ireland. Our friend, the artist Gottfried Helnwein, has a castle there, which is where we had the wedding. SP: [laughs] Did you have fun? Was it great? DVT: I had the time of my life. I think we both did. SP: What did you wear? DVT: I wore a giant purple silk-and-grosgrain taffeta dress by Vivienne Westwood and a Mr. Pearl corset. I also wore a little tricorn hat from Stephen Jones. I didn't want a white wedding or a Gothic wedding. It was somewhere in between-just beautiful, rich colors everywhere.

Helnwein, who grew up in Austria just after the Second World War had, like many others of his generation living in Germany or Austria, found it hard to come to terms with the Nazi past. As with fellow German and Austrian artists Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Hermann Nitsch, there is a sense of being plagued by history in his work, even though he says that art should never be about ideology - "I don't want to teach and explain."

The production designer is the internationally famed German artist, sculptor and photographer Gottfried Helnwein and he chose to color individually each of the three acts. Act I is blue to "represent the dawn and the gentle melancholy thereof." Act II is gold and yellow, the "colors of wealth and royalty," while Act III is red to denote its heady passions.

The near-spectacular gifts of painters such as Scott Hess, Cynthia Sitton, Peter Zokosky and Margret Nielsoen make this anthology as seductive as it is, but the star of the show is Gottfried Helnwein, whose meta-photo-realist apparitions have immediacy and sticking power of ghost stories, crime-site photographs or nightmares.

Cover: Gottfried Helnwein, untitled, 2005

Editor -- I am writing to suggest that the large image accompanying the review of the Gottfried Helnwein show at the Legion of Honor ("The art of Gottfried Helnwein demands a response," Monday) was inappropriate to place on the first page of the Datebook section, especially above the fold and in such a large format. It is certainly right for art to be dark and disturbing, and certainly right for people to have relatively easy access to art of all kinds -- hey, I'm an ACLU member and an avid fan of some pretty disturbing artists -- but you have to remember that The Chronicle is a family newspaper and that the Datebook section is often the one that children turn to first when they pick up the paper to search for the comics. Anyone with younger children can easily imagine the really horrifying effect this particular image would have. Couldn't you have found an image that would have suggested the nature of Helnwein's art without being such so frightening to children? Barring that, you should have printed it inside the fold and smaller. Thanks for thinking about the kids next time. Leif Brown Berkeley

The most controversial part of the festival this year is likely to be a West German ballet, Johann Kresnik's and Gottfried Helnwein's ''Macbeth,'' performed by the Bremer Theater from Bremen Aug. 15 to 17. This production is described in the festival literature as ''blood-boltered and violent, full of sadomasochistic images,'' and inspired not only by the Shakespeare tragedy but also by the more recent mysterious death of a West German politician in Schleswig-Holstein.

We hear you’re a huge Penn fan. Have you had a chance to meet him? We’re both friends with the painter Gottfried Helnwein. I was at one of his shows and Sean Penn was there. At one point I was on my cell giving someone directions because they got lost and Penn was looking at me because I was that dick at the art show on his cell phone. Fuck. I just looked down real embarrassed, completely mortified. People are like, “Hey, did you meet Sean Penn?” And all I can say is, “No, not yet.”

According to the theory that to find good young artists you should ask older artists what they think, Exit Art has organized this show: 24 artists, most of them novices to the scene (Charles Clough is the exception), were picked by 13 artists. The international selectors included Damien Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood, Nari Ward, Gottfried Helnwein, Ronald Jones, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith. The results aren't bad. Among what's notable are Iris Andraschek's creepy fish-tank concoctions, picked by Gottfried Helnwein...

Contemporary Looks "Radar: Selections From the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan" will be the principal opening exhibition. Among, the works on view will be Thomas Schutte's "Grosse Geister," (left), Franz Ackermann's "B 1 (Barbeque with the Duke)" (center) and Gottfried Helnwein's "Epiphany" (right).

“Look Now” was a spectacular show comprised of photography, installations, painting and video art. The images were often disturbing as the examples of Gottfried Helnwein’s haunting painting of a child in military dress and Tony Oursler’s disembodied, frog-like talking heads, which amused, admonished and interrogated their audience went fully to show. The exhibit attempted to “confront us with the realities that lie behind and between our fantasies of who we are and of the world in which we live,” and this was certainly chillingly and mesmerizingly achieved.

This is the first art history that analyzes the use of Disney imagery by such artists as Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol, Chagoya, Thiebaud, Helnwein, Boltanski, Dion, Pesanto, Ospina, Finley and many more. This book explores the impact of Disney, including artists’ economic and psychological motivations, on contemporary art. Disney refused permission for any images - their and artists.

At City Hall on Thursday, Nov. 16, the Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution commemorating the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht and recognizing Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein for his contributions to assuring that the Holocaust will never be forgotten. "Ninth November Night," a world-renowned exhibit of Helnwein's work commemorating Kristallnacht, will have its U.S debut at the Judge Lewis Quadrangle in Philadelphia next April.

Some of the biggest names in contemporary art are coming to the Denver Art Museum as part of an unprecedented year-long lecture series., funded by internationally known collectors Vicki and Kent Logan of Vail. The lineup, titled "Logan Lectures 2007," will feature 10 major artists from around the world whose works are on view in the museum's new $110 million Hamilton Building. The series begins in January and runs through December. Some of their pieces can be seen in the largest of the temporary exhibitions on view as part of the addition's inauguration - "Radar: Selections From the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan."

IN THE WASHINGTON bureau of The New York Times hangs a framed poster titled ''Boulevard of Broken Dreams.'' It is a painting by Gottfried Helnwein - inspired by the nostalgia and realism in Edward Hopper's painting ''Nighthawks'' - of four legendary people in a dreary diner at night. Working behind the counter is Elvis Presley; sitting on one stool by himself, coat collar turned up, with a white mug of coffee at hand, is an unshaven James Dean; Marilyn Monroe, blond head tossed back in provocative laughter, is seated close to Humphrey Bogart, wearing a bow tie as Rick in ''Casablanca,'' staring glumly at a glass in front of him. All dead too soon, but their images shimmer in the shared, broken dreams of our national memory.

Mr. Kresnik's stage pictures are often powerful. His ''Rheingold'' and ''Walküre'' compaction introduces Wagner; Nietzsche; King Ludwig; various Wagner wives and lovers; Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany; a ''red figure''; and modern-day soldiers and G.I.'s among the characters. Ludwig dances in his familiar blue jacket, naked from the waist down. Alberich hacks off his penis with a giant sword. The first act of ''Die Walküre'' is a trio for three naked men, one of whom becomes visibly pregnant (the wonders of a prosthesis and flesh-colored makeup). This last, it might be argued, successfully reintroduces the transgressive impact of incest to a modern audience lulled by Wagner's music.

Dita Von Teese: "Bespoke - whether it's jewellery design or putting together a party - is like, 'Wow.' I love the way the Regency and Victorian era really knew how to party. There was so much attention to detail. People have become lazy about entertaining. It’s all done to a formula.” Her dream theme is a Marie Antoinette banquet. "I love centrepieces dripping with flowers, berries and fruit. In those days, people would eat the table arrangements, and 1 love that irreverence. Marilyn and Dita were such fun to work with - they let me frame their cheesy childhood photos and put them on the walls of the castle in Tipperary.

Conceptual artist Gottfried Helnwein grew up in Vienna after World War II and was deeply influence by the Holocaust, Donald Duck, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones. His art constantly questions society by looking at its impact on the most innocent — the children.

But stand all this beside an Antony Gormley cage figure (White Cube) or the giant paintings of stillborn babies by Gottfried Helnwein, an artist revered in Germany and Austria (Robert Sandelson).

During the tour, curator Blake Milteer stopped the group in front of German artist Gottfried Helnwein’s “Epiphany” (“Adoration of the Magi”). In the large-scale piece that resembles a documentary black and white photograph, a Madonnaesque mother displays her baby to attentive Nazi officers. The baby’s likeness to Hitler is uncanny. Despite, or perhaps because of the distinctly sinister overtones in the piece, it’s easy to be drawn in by the piece. “Helnwein, characteristically, presents us with an ambiguous, haunting image and leaves us to wonder about its meaning ... ”

Mercedes Helnwein's immaculately executed drawings play out like dramatically lit, attractively cast indie flicks. To wit: In various works a jaded Lower East Side spinster type acts coy, wears torturously high heels, and poses half-naked with a duck. In this exhibition, aptly titled “Strange Days,” Helnwein (the Austria-born artist and talented offspring of the Austrian-Irish painter–photographer–performance artist Gottfried Helnwein) pictures a cast of strong, mysterious, seductive, peculiar women.

The show features a moving and disturbing cast of artists, including the international hyper-realist painter and high-life art star Gottfried Helnwein of Ireland and the unpretentious, almost clinical print-maker, German-born American Kiki Smith of New York City. Others in the show include Cristin Millet of Philadelphia, Diana Falchuk of Seattle, Japanese-born Chiharu Shiota of Berlin and James R. Southard of Louisville. All have an interest in the transience of life and its cultural mysteries.

The "Sehnsucht" cover, designed by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, shows ashen-faced band members bound, poked and disfigured by painful looking clamps and wires. The band's publicity photos are just as grisly.

Apokalypse is also the title of a show which brings one of Austria's most controversial figures back to his home country. Gottfried Helnwein's work will be featured in his first solo exhibit in Austria in the past ten years.

EDWARD HOPPER is too easily taken for granted: taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light, capable of converting a New England manse into a Fortress of Solitude; voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary; auteur of the diner reverie "Nighthawks," which not long ago was probably better known via Gottfried Helnwein's travesty "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."

MARILYN Manson's unheated Californian pile features mounted baboon heads; a lithograph, Epiphany 1 (Adoration of the Magi) by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, depicting the baptism of a Nazi Christ (Helnwein also shot the cover of Manson's fifth album, The Golden Age of Grotesque); and a Joachim Luetke sculpture Homunculus (a baby with chicken feet for hands and the lower body of a caterpillar). On a table, the anonymous aborted fetus in formaldehyde given to him as "a beautiful morbid gift" by his ex-wife, burlesque diva Dita von Teese.

With few fellow students and several activists, Helnwein stages a rebellion at the Akademy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The trigger was the refusal of the professors to allow student representatives a say in the entrance examinations. The event is carefully planned and choreographed by Helnwein. Professors are locked in, doors are set a blaze, the building is filled with smoke, paint splattered on the walls, windows smashed and serious damage is done. Panic breakes out and Riot police moves in. The Austrian media reported on the “student revolt at the Academy of Fine Arts". The next day Helnwein and his colleagues get picked up by custodians of the university and charged. Hertha Firnberg, Austrian minister of art and science, declares their action to be political and all investigations and criminal proceedings are dropped.

Nicola Costantino creates a bleak operating room reminiscent of the French film Delicatessen. Maybe the Troglodist characters from the movie help in understanding Costantino's nod to Gottfried Helnwein?

With her reddened lips slightly ajar and her eyes gently shut, this little girl could either be in serene repose or even, with her ghostly pallor, dead. Considering the artist who has created this hauntingly compelling image, it's possibly the latter. Gottfried Helnwein, the man in question, has always danced along that fine line of controversy.

Taschen is quick to spot a trend: Pierre et Gilles (of Mark Almond record covers fame) or the artist of the perpetual scream Gottfried Helnwein (Norman Mailer is a fan) are both the subjects of recent books.

`The Portrait Obscured,'' the current exhibit at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, where 19 artists have all but forgone the portrait entirely in their pursuit of it. The exhibit's signature pieces are two paintings by the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein. A bit of perceptual sleight of hand, two seemingly blue-black canvases on close inspection reveal portraits of John Lennon and Bruce Lee. Portraits obscured, to be sure, and perhaps a meditation on how unknowable are the famous by their famous faces.

Two generations of art provocateurs discuss tortured saints, world wars, and the unbearable lightness of being normal.

I have seldom seen injustice presented so directly and so well as a subject of fine art. The work of Leon Golub comes to mind, whose extravagant visions of contemporary torture are so chilling, in part because they exhibit with beautiful painting the smiling indifference of the torturers. Gottfried Helnwein paints views of sadistic punishment with the care and precision of a latter-day Vermeer. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro photograph the Spanish Civil War with the emotional intensity of Goya. Goya himself, whose paintings and prints — in a book of his etchings entitled The Disasters of War, published posthumously in 1863 — depict so effectively the savagery of guerilla warfare.

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Today, the body you were born with is no longer a “fixed” entity. In our appearance-obsessed society, people can change the physical contours of their bodies in a myriad of ways. Now, a bold new exhibition at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will explore the modern human form as it is imagined – by contemporary artists. Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection is drawn from one of the most prominent private collections of international contemporary art in the United States. Many of the artists whose works Vicki (Vassar class of 1968) and Kent Logan have collected are known for depictions of the human form that explore issues of psychological identity, and that reinvent figuration as a conceptual tool.

The city's essence feeds his dark, uneasy work, which tends toward violence and the grotesque: bandaged, broken children, scenes of torture, pooling blood, grimacing visages. What he creates, regardless of the medium — watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture — is a psychological excursion into the sublimated self, the obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are unflinching and surgical.

The recent landscape show by Gottfried Helnwein at the Crawford Gallery in Cork contained a homage to Friedrich’s The Wreck of the Hope, while the current Walker & Walker exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy features a three-dimensional recreation of his work Wanderer in the Mist. Because it is a show culled from the extensive collection of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, A German Dream does not include these two key works, both of which are in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, but the six works that are included still offer a tantalising taster. They point the way to understanding Friedrich’s iconic idealism and energy, but what they highlight even more pointedly is the need for a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work.

“I did a fairly major restoration and paint job on the front, but to be honest, there wasn’t too much about the interior to get excited about,” says the London native, an avid modern-art collector. “The previous owner lived here for over 30 years. I had to strip away three layers of old wall coverings to expose the original brick”­—now hung with a museum-wing’s worth of photography by Todd Hido and Lucas’ ex-girlfriend Elena Dorfman, a haunting multimedia canvas by Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein called I Walk Alone and a humorous “wallpapered” self-portrait by local artist Tim Sullivan. “It was really dark and filthy,” recalls Lucas. “Now, it’s open and warm.”

It's been said that a great portraitist can capture his subject's essence on film. If you've never come across a photographer who's lived up to that standard, check out Helnwein. He turns our cultural idols into flesh and blood human beings, whether they like it or not.

Waterford Fringe Festival will present a spectacular outdoor exhibition of Helnweins work in Sept of this year. The exhibition involves a series of his paintings screen printed to very large images and displayed on prominent Waterford city centre premises.

In the Republican Last Chance Saloon is a Norman Rockwell-style McCain, talking tough about Czechoslovakia, Iraq and jobs with blue-collar workers. (How early 1990s of him.) They paint Obama as a 1950s-style Gottfried Helnwein figure. But instead of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean in the diner, Obama sits alongside Paris and Britney. McCain gives new meaning to "Audacity Watch" with his sexually provocative, racially charged, dumbed-down subliminal ad campaign

The two celebs are reportedly going to bring in 2007 holed up in a remote Irish castle to which they travelled to recently. The Presleys will be staying at the exclusive Castle de La Poer in Co Tipperary, the home of Priscilla's pal, the reclusive Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein.

In February 2008 Kresnik presented the final production of his ensemble, based on Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle, in Berlin. Kresnik's Ring was created in collaboration with the painter and scenic designer Gottfried Helnwein, who expresses himself in his works of art just as politically as Kresnik. This is apparent with the poster to the production, which was also created by Helnwein: the head of an exhausted child lying in a pool of blood, overwhelmed by a heap of Euro coins. Kresnik and Helnwein argue on the topics power and money, force and war.

If you are a tourist whose arrival coincides with the festival, so much the better. Or worse, that is, should you want to take that defining photograph of one of Ireland's great castles and find it obscured by the massive, football pitch-size images by Gottfried Helnwein, whose work you may or may not like. "I don't give a damn what the hell it's supposed to be saying," announced an exasperated North American with a complicated-looking camera to the tiny woman at his side, "who in their right could justify poster art on an historic building smack dab in the tourist season or at any goddamn time." Some people appear to like the pictures of the local children. For others, the images are dismissed as "variations of Benetton-style advertising". Some women disapprove of the fact that the young girl's eyes are wearing eye make-up. A couple weren't happy about the children having their eyes closed, "It's, um, suggestive."

The child as a symbol of hope, purity and innocence triggers a protective reflex that taps into society's instinct to cherish and protect its young. Any tarnishing of this ideal is naturally going to provoke controversy, with art, literature and advertising strewn with instances of iconoclasts who have upset the moral applecart. (Henry James' novel The Turn of the Screw, the sinister paintings of Balthus, or the candid photographs by Sally Mann, are all examples.) It is within such company that Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein rests, as his controversial works cause people to sit up and take notice whenever he exhibits. Certainly, shocking images of deformed babies, Nazi ephemera and pseudo-religious overtones are not for the faint-hearted. However, the majority of the portrait paintings on show in the current exhibition at the Fenton are perhaps more palatable for the general viewer, as the imagery is comparatively sedate in terms of narrative and symbolism.

Clive Wilkinson's renovation of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, made him a design star. But the 53-year-old architect had never designed a house before he started on his own, in West Hollywood.

Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein conducts the commentary for a tour of his exhibition named "Angels Sleeping" at Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague Thursday, June 12, 2008. The exhibition deals with five circuits of his paintings: faces, violence committed against children, Nazism, "Art in America" and metaphorical portraits of the singer Marilyn Manson, seen in backgroud.

"For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Robert Flynn Johnson, the curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, has assembled a thought-provoking selection of Helnwein’s works and provided an insightful essay on his art in this exhibition catalogue. Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality. Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses."

“For me, the reaction so far in Waterford is very good because people are talking about the theme of war and exploitation. For a child to grow up now, it’s the toughest time ever because children are flooded with violence in the media and internet and computer games where the only thing to do is kill people and they are very graphic. Entertainment is very violent but as long as it’s entertainment, it’s fine, but as soon as you do it as art, people get very sensitive. In my art I’m only reflecting the world and I wanted to raise awareness and make people think.”

It’s immediately obvious that Angels Sleeping is going to be both powerful and unsettling. The first picture that catches the eye, “Modern Sleep I” (Moderní spánek I), is of a young girl wearing only a man’s jacket that brings to mind a Nazi uniform. A tear is in the corner of her eye and she appears to be looking fixedly at some object outside the painting’s scope. The light on her sweet-looking face and flashes of bare skin gives a sense of vulnerability and innocence that combines uncomfortably with how she is dressed. It creates a sense of foreboding in any observer thinking about what circumstances could lead to her being dressed this way. This is just the beginning of images that bring the maltreatment of children to the forefront, in particular Helnwein’s merciless references his country’s Nazi past.

This made perfect sense, I thought, considering the visuals attached to their recent album Sehnsucht: portraits of the band by Gottfried Helnwein, the brilliant German artist whose gauze-wrapped and fork-embellished self-portrait had been an album cover for the Scorpions -- you know the one I'm talking about? Helnwein had photographed the Rammstein faces after mangling and compromising them with arcane medical apparatus; and here I was, with my back mangled and compromised, being photographed by arcane medical apparatus! How very synchronistic it all was! Why, Helnwein was probably out there right now, conducting the band in their concerted hammerstrikes, perhaps even forming a mini mosh pit with my wife or discussing the finer points of arcane medical apparatus-based face-mangling with the MRI tech! Of course! And there were streamers, too! Multicolored streamers that descended from the antiseptic rafters and twisted and shimmered like silken snakes dancing in time to the music ...

WITH some of his "The Last Child" instal­lations reaching a massive 120ft, Austri­an born artist Gottfried Helnwein has been causing quite some controversy around Waterford City.

Art viewers who consider themselves shockproof should take a look at German painter Gottfried Helnwein's show...

The bride wore a flowing purple Vivienne Westwood number over her trademark cinched corset. Manson was his normal sepulchral white self, with black make-up and lipstick as they exchanged vows by candlelight in Ireland, at Gothic Castle Gurteen Le Poer in Kilsheelan, Co Tipperary. A designer-fest costing an estimated $500,000, the bride wore Christian Louboutin shoes to trip up the aisle while the groom wore a John Galliano black-silk taffeta tux. They exchanged their vows at midnight in the home of their artist friend Gottfried Helnwein and the invited guest list was studded with showbiz royalty, including Madonna, Keanu Reeves, David Lynch, Lisa Marie Presley, and Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.

With ironic images of toys and cartoon figures, a number of contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors take incisive aim at the emotional underbelly of childhood in The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from September 1, 2000, through January 2, 2001. Explaining how these representations question deeply rooted social mores, this exhibition includes over 30 playful and wicked works-drawn from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan-by such contemporary artists as Gottfried Helnwein, David Levinthal, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Laurie Simmons and Hung Tung-lu. As Kent Logan states, "Of the themes in our collection this exhibition will explore what I like to call 'Children's Hour.'"

''Art Miami has done a really good job,'' said Miami collector Dennis Scholl, echoing an oft-heard sentiment at Tuesday's VIP opening, a charity event for Lotus House. Among works for sale: Gottfried Helnwein's photographs of Marilyn Mason at Barry Friedman gallery; Roy Lichtenstein's Water Lily at Galerie Terminus and an eye-catching photo of President-elect Barack Obama by Martin Scholler at Hasted Hunt Gallery.

Barry Friedman, who exhibited for the first time last year after the organizers shifted the event to coincide with ABMB, said: " This is a great fair. Last year I made $2m in the first 24 hours, although with the economic climate this year, I'll be ecstatic if I make a quarter of that." On the opening night he sold several pieces, including Gottfried Helnwein's startling 2003 photographic print "The Golden Age 37", which went to an existing New York client.

The eyes are plucked out because they are no longer needed, is the first thought the Gottfried Helnwein exhibition creates. Helnwein's most widely known work is probably the self-portrait made for the 1982 Scorpions record cover. In it recurs the same subject matter which Helnwein had put to use in dozens of works.

Peter Plate’s novel “Soon the Rest Will Fall,” just released in paperback from Seven Stories Press. The terrifying Gottfried Helnwein image so perfectly embodies the title of this dark novel that it seems the latter could be the former’s caption (the Helnwein is actually called “The Resurrection of the Child”).

Gottfried Helnwein is trying to detach himself from the influences of Vienna School and to open up a completely new world. The lasses and figures he paints almost always bear some sort of surgical scar and the canvas it teemed with a sadistic aroma. His sadism, however, is quite different from the gloomy Middle Ages type. He tries to drag it out under the sun. His "Ruthless Republic"is something which Pop Art intentionally averted. The artist gives light to the shadows with a strong sun. Herein we see Helnwein's over-sensitive logic and his sensibility.

The Israeli Opera Tel Aviv-Yafo will celebrate its upcoming 25th season (as well as Tel Aviv's 100th anniversary) with a program that features seven operas and a musical. The Child Dreams - an opera by Israeli composer Gil Shohat, based on Hanoch Levin's play - will have its world premiere in January 2010. The opera will be directed by the artistic director of the Cameri Theater, Omri Nitzan, with sets and costumes designed by Gottfried Helnwein - who is familiar to local opera buffs for his amazing Der Rosenkavalier a few years ago.

Her portfolio gained an Excellence endorsement and has been the only one in Otago and Southland to be selected for the Top Art touring exhibition of art works by New Zealand's top secondary school art pupils. Ms Carr said her exhibit was based on the work of artist Gottfried Helnwein, who showed the effects of war on German children by using bandages in his images.

...or how about odd nerdrum...or gottfried helnwein if you just wanna talk about paint handling these two are far superior...and perhaps being a child of a "ironic culture" has something to do with you liking the paintings...perhaps me being a child of a violent one has something to do with not liking them... I understand the subjectivity in art but I was hoping we'd stop breeding new "quirku" warhols

"My works are questions, not answers", says the Austrian, Gottfried Helnwein, time and time again focusing on the most sore points of contemporary, general and private history.

RECORD numbers are expected to visit Kilkenny's art festival over the next week. Organisers say attendance at shows and exhibitions on the first weekend indicates that up to 80,000 people will have visited by the time the 10-day event finishes next Sunday. The main talking point of the festival is a series of paintings including one by world-renowned Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, who took an old photograph of Adolf Hitler surrounded by children and replaced it with the Madonna and Child surrounded by SS officers. Heinwein's paintings are hanging on a number of buildings around the city, including Kilkenny Castle, the National Irish Bank and the Watergate Theatre. Funding for the festival is the highest to date with the organisers receiving more than £400,000.

. . . Barnaby Conrad III and Martin Muller were in St. Petersburg to see Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's retrospective of 450 paintings at the State Museum. Helnwein is prolific; Martin always has a dozen or so of his paintings at his gallery, Modernism. ``In Germany some refer to Warhol as pre- Helnwein,'' said Barnaby, who has a Helnwein in his home. Get the picture?

World-renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein, known for his hyper-realistic and provocative paintings will dedicate his unique installation at the SAVE THE WORLD AWARDS ON July 24 at the Zwentendorf Nuclear Reactor to Michael Jackson. Helnwein was a close friend of the late artist for many years. The Austrian artist will present over-dimensional works of children from his “Murmur of the Innocents” cycle and “The Last Child” as well as his photo portraits of Michael Jackson, currently on exhibit at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Gottfried Helnwein and Michael Jackson worked on various projects together.

I've walked into Modernism, and I can't seem to leave. A young girl of perhaps 9 or 10 is the central figure in a riveting series, called The Murmur of the Innocents by renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein. She is large-eyed and blond-haired, with a gravity that belies her years, both mesmerizing and painful to look at. I make the rounds of the gallery with the rest of the visitors, each of us transfixed. First she looks directly at us, then she's lost in her own sadness, oblivious to our stares. Around the next corner, she's sullen, then defiant, then helpless in a blindfold; finally she's bloody and bandaged, and we don't know why. I finally tear myself away, but she stays with me, along with the questions I cannot voice.

As befits the first part of David Glass' Lost Child Trilogy, the pervasive image is one of children abandoned, clinging for security to a few souvenirs and memories of a childhood washed away by tides of fear and loneliness. Yet everyone viewing this production will tell you their own interpretation of what they thought they saw. Some may refer to Jung, Freud or Janov, to the bandage-wrapped anguish art of Gottfried Helnwein or the bleak emotional desolation of Edvard Munch, or argue that the piece is an exploration of the loss of innocence, the bondage of family ties, or the rituals of pain involved in leaving childhood behind.

cover: "Head of a Child 4" inside: "Head of a Child 5" 2000, oil and acrylic on canvas, and "Ninth of November Night", 1988, installation at the Museum Ludwig, cologne

Friedman Benda announces representation of the Austrian-born artist Gottfried Helnwein. The artist's first New York solo exhibition opens September 17th featuring painting and documentary film. A second exhibition presenting a new body of work, currently in progress, will open at Friedman Benda in May 2010.

The child has grown into a world famous artist. But he has carried his questions with him. Today opens a large retrospective exhibition of Helnwein's art in Waino Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku. The exhibition contains aquarels, oil paintings, drawings and photographs. They have often caused controversies by dealing with subjects that are all too sensitive.

Wo möchtest du deine Werke in zwanzig Jahren sehen? Vielleicht an einer Wand mit Bildern von Neo Rauch, Gerhard Richter und Sigmar Polke? "Wenn du mir einen Platz an einer Wand neben Gottfried Helnwein angeboten hättest, hätte ich den genommen. Von mir aus können die Sachen auch in der Toilette meines Psychiaters hängen. Wichtig ist nur, dass ich sie überhaupt noch sehen kann und nicht heimlich meinen Namen entfernen muss, weil meine Werke vielleicht einem Stil, aber nicht meinem eigenen Anspruch entsprechen."

For designer Helnwein, receiving the text of Levin's play was "an epiphany," because "when I read the play… I felt that I was looking at my [own] work." Much of this work concerns the images of children that society would rather not see. For IO general manager Hannah Munitz, this is a milestone production.

Works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Peter Beard, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, Wolfgang Tillmans as well as an unusual portrait of Michael Jackson by Gottfried Helnwein (estimate of 5,000-7,000 EUR) will be put up for auction.

Sales reports were extremely upbeat. These included a Chuck Close tapestry for $120,000 and “a major Miro” that brought six figures at Contessa Gallery, two Jean Dubuffet pieces that sold in “the hundreds of thousands” at David Klein Gallery, an Eric Fischl painting at $300,000, a Frank Stella for $145,000, and two works by John Chamberlain at $200,000 and $300,000 at Mark Borghi Fine Art Inc.; a Gottfried Helnwein painting that went “for six figures” at Barry Friedman Ltd;

Directed by Melina Matsoukas (who's helmed videos for the likes of Beyoncé, Eve and Lady Gaga), "Hard" is a high-gloss, expensive-looking thing, featuring Rihanna wearing a Mickey Mouse helmet à la Gottfried Helnwein and Marilyn Manson.

"In a very poetic way [Hanoch Levin] describes the world we live in," says Helnwein, "with the child as metaphor for innocence, purity, confronted with the corrupt adult world. The adult characters, even the mother and father, are all archetypes; the child doesn't understand this world. With complete trust, he thinks that the bond between himself and his mother is unbreakable, but, of course, it's broken… A huge picture-wall of a sleeping child, through which the soldiers break, is the first of four amazing sets, culminating in a "universe of dead children in an infinity of space."

An installation by artist Gottfried Helnwein in memory of Kristallnacht will be presented in Israel for the first time to coincide with the staging of The Child Dreams - the first opera to be based on a play by Hanch Levin - for which Helnwein designed the stage.

Levin's profoundly philosophical, abstract and ironic, sharply pointed ideas hardly lend themselves to the operatic medium. What came closest to Levin's spirit were Gottfried Helnwein's set and Omri Nitzan's direction. These were the main heroes of the performance, highly imaginative, altogether unconventional - without gliding into sophistication - and thought provoking.

2001 - Gottfried Helnwein at Kilkenny Arts Festival

Logan, a 53-year-old investment banker, leads a tour of his house in the Marin County town of Tiburon, perched above the San Francisco Bay. The eclectically furnished, art-packed living room sets the tone. On one side of the room, Untitled (Venus/The Great Circle) by Jean-Michel Basquiat hangs catercorner to David Park's brooding canvas The Bathers. Across the way, Andy Warhol's Double Jackie faces off against The Room, a whimsical Philip Guston. There's a ravishing, newly purchased early Hockney, Seated Woman Being Served Tea, in the dining room, and looming above a stairwell is Gottfried Helnwein's powerful Untitled (Child).

BOCHUM, GERMANY - MARCH 28: Gottfried Helnwein presents his award during the Steiger Awards ceremony at the Jahrhunderthalle on March 28, 2009, in Bochum, Germany.

HOLLYWOOD - JUNE 24: Musician/poet Lou Reed poses with actor/comedian Richard Lewis and artist Gottfried Helnwein at a ceremony inducting Reed into the Hollywood Rock Walk on June 24, 2003 at the Guitar Center store in Hollywood, California.

Mercedes Helnwein and Gottfried Helnwein at the Art Share in Los Angeles, California

This leads to the current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Who will he select to depict him – in all his glory? There already exists an exquisite portrait of Schwarzenegger the body-builder done in 1977 by Jamie Wyeth. Were they alive today, perhaps Richard Rubenstein (of Interview cover fame), or even Andy Warhol himself, could have painted the official portrait. Since post-Studio 54, Schwarzenegger has been good friends with Gottfried Helnwein. Given his style of hyperrealism, I would not be surprised if he is chosen to paint the official portrait. This would be a similar break with tradition as was Brown's work, but given the history of this Governor and the unorthodox nature of both his personality and his ascension, a traditional portrait would seem out of place.

This amazing, eight foot Gottfried Helnwein piece will look dope in some lucky Disney exec's office! So 600 mil... PLUS a Mickey painting! Filmmaker Kevin Smith writes WaxWord that he has desperately been trying to help Bob and Harvey Weinstein close the deal to buy Miramax. "I've sweetened the Weinstein's offer to buy Miramax back," he writes. "All day yesterday and just now this morning, I've been throwing Tweets and large artwork at the Mouse to up the ante, but they've not responded." Smith is a Weinstein diehard, who has been following the MIramax sale closely. The brothers bravely backed Smith in making such lasting cultural oddities ...landmarks... movies as "Clerks," "Mallrats," and "Chasing Amy." He has been Twittering (@thatkevinsmith) to his million-plus followers about the deal - offernig Mickey Mouse paintings, for example. The deal is in the midst of pitched negotiations since the Weinsteins were granted an exclusive window through the weekend to try and close the deal.

Back in 2004, Marilyn Manson announced that he will write and direct a feature film called "Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll." The film never happened, but in 2006, a promo trailer was shot. That trailer is now online. This teaser features real-life twin sisters engaging in questionable acts and burlesque superstar Dita Von Teese. The figure in the medical mask is artist Gottfried Helnwein and the bird-face masked character and white gloved Lewis Carroll impresario, is Marilyn Manson."

"The figure with the mask is the artist Gottfried Helnwein medical and character with a bird mask and white gloves by the impresario Lewis Carroll, is Marilyn Manson."

The Crocker Art Museum will present a series of special exhibitions to celebrate its opening, among them Wayne Thiebaud: Homecoming, a new retrospective of the work of Sacramento’s most famous artist, who held his first solo exhibition at the Crocker nearly 60 years ago. The works of Gottfried Helnwein, and John Buck will be featured in exhibitions opening in the winter of 2011. In summer 2011, the Crocker will present A Summer of Impressionism, with works by renowned French and American artists showcased in exhibitions alongside works by California Impressionists, one of the central strengths of the Crocker’s permanent collection.

The exhibition in the WA Museum of Art by the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein does not make you happy, but it does feel good - in a masochistic way. With his works Helnwein proves that under a sophisticated facade this world is a wretched place to live in. In an interview he says: "I know that individuals are poorly treated on this planet. They are being harmed and subdued. And all this is covered by optimistic propaganda. Far before I began painting I felt that humanity was in a dire state. The pain reaches out to everyone, even though it is rarely spoken of. Nonetheless everyone wants to overcome the pain, to transcend it."

High polish and verisimilitude are undeniably impressive when done right: Gottfried Helnwein's "Child" paintings, Jeff Koons' faux-inflatables, or Patricia Piccinini's eerily uncanny monsters would all fall flat if their slickly unquestionable surfaces were any less perfect.

Helnwein creates hallucinatory images of reverie, and it is with powerful gestures of light and shadow that he seduces the viewer even as he depicts the aftermath of violence, brutality and suffering. His paintings often depict children as victims of unexplained violence, representing them as archetypal characters in a theatre of cruelty perpetrated by unseen forces. Equally mesmerizing are the artist’s personifications of Mickey Mouse and anime figures, casting them in his on-going exploration of psychological and sociological anxiety and society’s darkest impulses.

Salvador Dali's "Hitler Masturbating" is a masterpiece of satire, or so says my inner Beavis, anyhow.  Gottfried Helnwein's painting Epiphany I is another excellent example, reminding us that not only was Hitler once a baby, but also that we can recognize him without his mustache.

Using the metaphor of youthful innocence as a means to reveal the age-old violence that continues to permeate our times, Gottfried Helnwein produces impeccable realist paintings that send shivers down the spine. Casting children in the roles of both perpetrators and victims of war and terror, the LA-based artist strikes a sensitive nerve with his haunting visual narratives.

Helnwein is highly recommended even to those who do not have a predilection for morbid or grotesque art, for his intention is not merely to shock or titillate. Whereas many modern artists get lost in the artifice of excessive conceptualism, Gottfried Helnwein continues to produce challenging, thought-provoking work based on the weight of the subject matter, not the way in which it is presented. Having produced a wide range of imagery in a variety of mediums, Helnwein’s development is fascinating to trace from conceptual beginnings to his current synthesis of pop and fine art.

On a more costume/fashion note at college I designed costumes for dark fairytale operas- Gottfried Helnwein was such a fantastic inspiration with his extravagant rococo style opera dresses filled with lights.

In the coming months, visitors can look forward to screenings of “The Silence of Innocence,” a documentary on artist Gottfried Helnwein, who is the subject of a career-spanning survey at the Crocker from Jan. 29 through April 24.

Organized by the Crocker, the exhibition features 70 major paintings and photographs from throughout Helnwein’s career. Highlights include his iconic portraits of performer Marilyn Manson, works from his major recurring theme, “The Child,” and his most recent series, “Disasters of War.” “Inferno of the Innocents” is the first museum exhibition to examine Helnwein — who has been based in Los Angeles part-time for nearly 10 years — as a California artist.

Lial A. Jones, Mort and Marcy Friedman Director of the Museum, states “This exhibition will upset some, but it will also challenge and inspire others. Artists respond to the world around them. Sometimes that response is beautiful, sometimes difficult. I believe that museums have a responsibility to exhibit works that are important and relevant. This show, like others in our past and future, does this.”

"The Murmur of the Innocents 18," oil on canvass by artist Gottfried Helnwein, of Austria, at the 15th annual American International Fine Art Fair held at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach Saturday.

Gottfried Helnwein WHAT: The Crocker kicks off the season with a challenging exhibition of works by this Austrian-born, Los Angeles-based artist. His sometimes disturbing images address themes of inhumanity, violence and lost innocence.

Truth is like a lion in a cage. There’s no need to defend it — just open the door. The artistic pursuit of truth is the driving passion of internationally renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein. His work is disturbing and controversial, because he places the lion outside of its cage, right in front of the viewer. “Gottfried Helnwein: Inferno of the Innocents” is a survey of a broad spectrum works by a man determined to make humanity confront itself.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Dolby Chadwick Gallery presents Heads, a group exhibition curated by Peter Selz. This exhibition brings together a diversity of works that manifest the show’s title – and organizing theme –in unique and compelling ways. Artists exhibiting include Stephen DeStaebler, Edwige Fouvry, Sherie’ Franssen, Lucian Freud, Ann Gale, Patrick Graham, Gottfried Helnwein, Alex Kanevsky, Jim Morphesis, Nathan Oliveira and Irving Petlin.

Does the face or some other aspect of the head enable it to betoken a whole individual as, say, a foot or a knee cannot? Or does the quality of scrutiny, the creative scruple an artwork registers matter most, as two Lucian Freud prints here suggest? "Heads" does not answer such questions. Perhaps no exhibition could. But by dramatic contrasts in style - among Gottfried Helnwein, Sherie Franssen, Alex Kanevsky and others - it reopens them in lively fashion.

Individually, the paintings of Gottfried Helnwein can strike a viewer as contrived, manipulative and heartless. But put several dozen of them together, as the Crocker Art Museum has done, and they rock, shaking out the quotient of grave common concern in his private obsessions. Helnwein deliberately evokes the disillusioned view of childhood promoted by another Viennese eminence, Sigmund Freud. But he also fingers the global entertainment industry as an infernal influence, using meticulous realism to place oddly irreal figures borrowed from Disney and anime on a common footing with his human subjects. Despite the lyrical passages in his work, Helnwein appears bent on inducing a distaste for images among consumers of them who have lost perspective on their tyrannizing power. His frequent use of nearly cinematic scale makes this shock therapy both unforgettable and hard to endure.

The innovative contemporary dance company known as CORE Dance Collective is making quite a name for its young – only 4 years old – self. The first company to be commissioned by the Crocker Art Museum to create a dance, CORE created a stark piece inspired by the work of artist Gottfried Helnwein, whose work is on display at the museum through April 24.

The exhibition, aiming to look at the uniqueness of spaces, places, characters, and stage images created by and for Levin, the great theater innovator, is realized by Tali Itzhaki in collaboration with Gadi Dagon, Gotfried Helnwein, Michael Kramenko and Rakefet Levi.

The National Theatre of Scotland and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, present two shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year. The Wheel (image by Gottfried Helnwein) is an unnerving new play by Zinnie Harris (Further than the Furthest Thing), directed by National Theatre of Scotland Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone.

Collectors Contemporary stages up to nine exhibitions and fair participations a year featuring the likes of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Daniel Buren, Gottfried Helnwein and artists like Chris Levine and Russell Young whom it represents exclusively in the region.

Well, I grew up in an interesting religion, called Christianity. The first art I saw as a little child were the paintings of tortured saints in the church; blood drenched, squirming people in colorful drapery, gazing towards heaven, grinning in ecstasy. The center of the worship was a man nailed onto a wooden cross, crowned with a crest of thorns piercing his head. And again, blood is dripping all over his skinny body. For 2000 years people in the western world grew up with iconography, songs and rites that glorify blood, pain and death, and God, the creator of the whole universe is allegorized as a bearded man dying in anguish. In this tradition, blood got a deeply symbolic and mystic significance and meaning. The greatest artists of the Occident have depicted blood in so many aesthetic variations in the most beautiful paintings, so that these images are now deeply imbedded in our collective subconscious memory.

The hyper-real piece by painter Gottfried Helnwein entitled "Head of a Child" caught the eye of Jason Handy, 34, of Miami who had to touch it to believe that it was a painting and not a photograph. Art Miami art fair open for prieview for VIP in Midtown on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 in Miami

How many art handlers does it take to hang a giant Damien Hirst painting just right? You’d be surprised. From perching a 70,000 pound Do Ho Suh ”house” into the side of the roof of a university building to de-installing Carsten Höller’s mirrored carousels to lugging a precious Gottfried Helnwein through the halls of the Russian State Museum — the professional installation of art requires a keen eye, physical precision, a practical sense of aesthetics, and the ability not to drop anything under pressure.

Tolerate this. Imagine penitents scuttling down a valley of tears, as every thing around them erupts in squeals of meaty humbuckers and slithering single-coils, leaving nothing but scorched bloody earth. A cloud of burning flesh. A tremble of misshapen shadows. Everything is shot to hell. A vision of Bosch, with a backdrop by Gottfried Helnwein, and soundtracked by a tiger moon quartet called Intolerant.

Gottfried Helnwein and The Dreaming Child offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the creation of The Child Dreams, an opera designed by world-famous Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein for the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv in 2010. The Child Dreams is based on the play written by Israel's most celebrated playwright, Hanoch Levin, who died in 1999.

Kent Logan, a San Francisco collector, amasses his art in true corporate fashion: with flow charts mapping what he has and what he doesn't. Hs most extensive acquisitions include, below from left, Francesco Clemente's "Self-Portrait" (1984), Mark Tansey's "Occupation" (1984), Cindy Sherman's "Film Still #6" (1977), Gottfried Helnwein's "Untitled (Child)" (1996) and Anselm Kiefer's "Operation Sea Lion" (1975).

A look behind the scenes as the Austrian artist designs an opera about the Holocaust, “The Child Dreams,” for the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv. Lisa Kirk Colburn directed.

Yet, a step inside the cool, white, 2,000-square-foot gallery – currently filled with the strange and steampunky works of Ray Caesar, Gottfried Helnwein and Anita Kunz.

In Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child, the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein clashes with the production team of the Israeli opera as he collaborates with them on an adaptation of a play about children and the Holocaust. Behind-the-scenes footage gives viewers a sense of the artistic conflicts and the acclaimed result. (First Run; Nov. 23)

The proof is in the pudding, however, and, although limited, what we are allowed to see of the actual production is impressive indeed, in terms of set design, color, lighting and dramatic impact. Helnwein pulls off a fourth-act coup de theatre, staging Levin’s idea of a pile of dead children as a more viscerally exciting image of suspended bodies, like barely alive puppets, which is quite breathtaking.

It’s fascinating to watch Helnwein, unaccustomed to creative compromise, navigate the details and politics of a large-scale theatrical production, whether by rolling up his sleeves to daub cobalt onto a foam boulder so that it matches a craggy Caspar David Friedrich scene or micromanaging the stage makeup. In the end, Helnwein is pleased. “It brought all of the children I have painted before together,” he says of the opera’s fourth act. “I treat the staging like a canvas, but it’s three-dimensional and everything moves.”

One of the great things about this documentary is that, while many out there might be familiar with Helnwein’s artwork or installations, they may not be familiar with where his ideas come from, or what it’s like when he works. In that way, the film is a wonderful look at a stunning contemporary artist.

The sets and costumes designed by the artist are indeed visually impressive, especially a haunting image of children suspended over the stage like ascending angels.

Mendelsohn would not comment on any specifics, but we've heard that the painting already is complete, and that the well-known artist Gottfried Helnwein did it. Schwarzenegger is fond of Helnwein's work, and had his landscape painting of the Mojave Desert hanging in the governor's office.

It’s been a great year for documentaries, from Chad Friedrichs‘s exploding of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth to filmic glimpses into the life and work of artists including Marina Abramović, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Wayne White, Gregory Crewdson, and Gottfried Helnwein.

Perhaps one of the toughest things to do is to capture the creative process on film. A movie showing a writer tapping away at a keyboard, or a musician putting down the notes he hears in his head, tells you nothing about what the artist is actually going through. Perhaps the closest we’ve gotten is the 1956 documentary “The Mystery of Picasso” where the camera is placed on one side of a canvas and an unseen Picasso creates pictures on the other side. We watch as the pigments bleed through while the work is being formed, and try to anticipate what the artist will do next. “Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child” is a similar attempt. The 2011 documentary, newly released to DVD, is about a different kind of art: the production of an opera. As with a dramatic film, a stage performance like an opera is a collaboration of many talents, which means there are going to be compromises, differences of opinion and, sometimes, an artistic vision that must fight through competing visions. That is what occurred here.

The creative masterpiece you wish bore your signature? - Oh man. That’s a loaded question. I don’t even know how to answer it. I will just pick one person. I wish I could draw like Gottfried Helnwein. Look up his work. It will blow your mind.

To inaugurate the new exhibition space, which has to be one of the most dramatic in the city, Gosselin chose a powerful show of black-and-white photos by the Viennese-born German artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein's work is everything that Annie Leibovitz's, shown last spring at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is not. While both shoot celebrities - Helnwein's subjects include Keith Richards, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, William S.Burroughs, and an extremly wasted Andy Warhol - Helnwein's work is concentrated on the Psychological rather than on the gimmicky and the theatrical.

Outside the Osbournes' mansion last week, Manson and modernist Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein premiered two paintings from a collection that will be used as The Golden Age of Grotesque's artwork and will travel with the singer. Inspired by the glamour of 1930s Hollywood, the grotesque of vaudeville and the erotic art movement in Weimar Berlin, the pieces are disturbing portraits of Manson wearing the classic Mickey Mouse ears hat. "This is an image of innocence and an image of childish nightmares," Manson explained. "This is, to me, growing up in America, what I saw in entertainment and the contrasting extremes of beauty and ugliness.

The last years of Marlene Dietrich's life "were very lonely and secluded in Paris," said German painter and photographer Gottfried Helnwein, who collaborated with the legendary actress on a book published last year.

...in Sacramento, at least, none of his activities may create more buzz than the unveiling of his official portrait. The work is by celebrated Austrian Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein - who is known for his paintings of stark brutality, children in distress and Hitler. The details of the Helnwein portrait were revealed by Austrian journalist Barbara Gasser, a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who reported that the piece is a neo-realist, monochromatic study of the former governor - decidedly a departure from what currently hangs in the Capitol. Mendelsohn would not discuss the work, saying only that the public would see it soon.

Six-figure sales far surpassed 2012 purchases for paintings, sculptures, photographs and mid-media works by artists such as Francis Bacon, Fernando Botero, Alexander Calder, Lynn Chadwick, Marc Chagall, John Chamberlain, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Andreas Gursky, Keith Haring, Gottfried Helnwein, David Hockney, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, Sol LeWitt, Vik Muniz, A.R. Penck, Richard Prince,  Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Wayne Thiebaud, Tom Wesselmann  and other blue chip artists. 

"Blackout" is SCORPIONS' eighth studio album, released in 1982 on EMI and Mercury. A self-portrait of artist Gottfried Helnwein is featured on the cover of the album. Rudolf Schenker portrays this character in the "No One Like You" music video. Shirts with this album artwork on them are amongst the most popular SCORPIONS t-shirts.

Schell employed edgy artist Gottfried Helnwein to create sets and costumes for his production of "Rosenkavalier." The poster for the production generated some local buzz for its portrayal of two women who looked like they were about to kiss. In an interview with The Times during rehearsals, Schell explained: "These are our times. 'The L Word,' for instance, is shown all over Europe. For another, you cannot keep the present off the stage."

Stunning. It’s the best single word to describe Inferno of the Innocents, the exhibit of work by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein that opened at the Crocker on January 29th. Let’s start with the obvious: Helnwein is one hell of a painter. His massive, photo-like pictures of vulnerable children are breathtaking, both in the often disturbing nature of the imagery and in the artist’s virtuostic ability to mimic life with pigment (a mixture of oil and acrylic) and brush. Each bloodied hair seems utterly real; pale, near-translucent skin seems to cover actual flesh, and the eyes of Helnwein’s child subjects are damp and deep. But, while Helnwein is a master painter, his skill serves only to bring his carefully crafted scenes to fruition; it is the artist’s combination of sophisticated brushwork and calculated, provocative imagery that defines his art.

Twenty somethings' apartments around the world have been graced with posters of Gottfried Helnwein's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, featuring Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Elvis Presley (a parody of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks).

RIchmond members have every reason to stick forks in their eyes. What would drive a man to stick forks into his eyes? And is such a scene worthy of painterly depiction? Multi-disciplinary Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein obviously thought so when he painted his self-portrait as Screaming, Bandaged Man, Blinded by Forks (1982).

Übersetzung des englischen Textes von Mic Moroney: THE MURMUR OF THE INNOCENTS. Katalog "Helnwein", one man show and Installation in the City o Kilkenny, The Kilkenny Arts Festival 2001

Austrian-born artist Gottfried Helnwein is a brave, often overlooked, and unfairly compared virtuoso of versatility. In his work, he forces us to confront, via his visual wit, brio, and candor, the human face of violence and angst. The recent solo retrospective of over 400 works on view at the Marble Palace, the contemporary wing of the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, proved Helnwein a master of many forms: from painting to installation, from photography to illustration, from sculpture to performance. His flexibility is so impressive that he almost seems a hoax.

Das Feature geht also vielversprechend los. Bald darauf erscheint der österreichische Maler Gottfried Helnwein in Piratenaufmachung und sagt kluge Dinge. Ein norwegischer Zeichner tritt auf und erklärt, Donald Duck sei "die Basis dessen, was ich bin". So eingestimmt, hören wir auch gern die gelehrten Darlegungen des Donaldisten Andreas Platthaus. 

Es ist schwer zu glauben, was Gottfried Helnwein da sagt: Als er das erste Mal einen Mickey-Mouse-Comic gesehen hatte, ging für ihn das Tor zum Himmel auf, er habe zum ersten Mal Farbe wahrgenommen. Offenbar ging für ihn das Tor zum Himmel aber rasch wieder zu, denn seine Kunstwerke sind alles andere als himmlisch. Technisch gesehen vielleicht ja, aber thematisch geht das eher in die andere Richtung. Das Wichtige jedoch ist, dass Gottfried Helnwein ein großer Fan von Donald Duck und seinem Vater Carl Barks ist. Er verehrt Barks vielmehr, wie er in der Arte-Doku „Das Donald-Duck-Prinzip“ erzählt - und Barks schätzte Helnwein.

The official gubernatorial portrait of former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is displayed in the Rotunda of the State Capitol following an unveiling ceremony Monday in Sacramento, California. The portrait was painted by Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein is known for his stark and dramatic work, including a series on children in war, a watercolor of Adolf Hitler and some rather grotesque self-portraits. He also worked with  Marilyn Manson 

On Monday, he unveiled his official gubernatorial portrait, a hyper-realistic painting that is more than 6 feet high. It's at least 1,000 square inches bigger than the portrait of former Gov. Gray Davis — whom Schwarzenegger ousted in the 2003 recall election — making it the largest among those of recent California governors. "We were never afraid to dream big," he said. "It is in our DNA as Californians." Schwarzenegger, an immigrant from Austria, chose Austrian-born artist Gottfried Helnwein to paint the portrait and paid for it himself. In a statement, Helnwein described Schwarzenegger as "larger than life." Creating the portrait "was quite a challenge, and I enjoyed every moment of it," he said.

The portrait, which will eventually hang on the third floor, was done by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, a realist who previously painted Andy Warhol and John F. Kennedy.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, returning to Sacramento for the first time since leaving office, unveiled his official gubernatorial portrait at the Capitol on Monday, a lifelike image of the movie star politician standing in front of the state seal.

SACRAMENTO Calif. (Reuters) - Four years and seven movies after Arnold Schwarzenegger left California's highest office, the actor and politician drew a packed crowd at the unveiling of his official portrait Monday, a flashbulb-popping event as much about star power as politics. The photo-realistic portrait, painted by Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein, shows the 67-year-old former bodybuilder in front of the California state seal, wearing a gray suit and a blue-and-black striped tie, a smile on his lips and his complexion ruddy.

The artist was Austrian-born Gottfried Helnwein, who called the former governor “larger than life,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The portrait, which depicts a smiling Mr. Schwarzenegger against an image of the governor’s seal, was described by those in attendance as “regal” and “huge,” the newspaper reported.

Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to the Capitol Monday for the unveiling of his gubernatorial portrait. The Hollywood icon also said that he never expected to see his portrait hang in the Capitol Building.

Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to the Capitol Monday for the unveiling of his gubernatorial portrait.

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s official portrait was unveiled on Monday as the former governor returned to California’s Capitol. If having a movie star running the state didn’t make enough of an impression, now there is a permanent marker of Schwarzenegger’s time in office.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger lifted the curtain on his official portrait Monday, revealing a photograph-like giant image of the onetime bodybuilder standing in front of the official California seal. Schwarzenegger unveiled the portrait at a ceremony in the state Capitol in which he made a rare appearance in Sacramento nearly four years after he left office. The oversized portrait of a youthful Schwarzenegger, which will eventually hang on the third floor, was painted by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, a realist who previously painted Andy Warhol and John F. Kennedy.

The Gottfried Helnwein seen on the poster advertising his show and the Gottfried Helnwein viewed in person seem to be a study in contradictions. With his head bandaged and eyes literally pierced by two forks, the poster Helnwein shatters glass with his seemingly torturous cries. In person, Helnwein's taut skin is unblemished; his personality, approachable and warm. But as he begins to talk, it becomes clear that he is indeed the creator of the madman.

The oversize work, painted by Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein, is a photograph-like image of a youthful looking Schwarzenegger standing in front of the official California seal. "When I was a young man in Austria, I dreamed about coming to California every day," said Schwarzenegger, an immigrant who eventually married into the family of the late US President John F Kennedy.

To this day, Mickey remains for the artist a transitional figure, full of irony between the innocent imagination of children and an often cruel world. Even without these implications, Helnwein's gargantuan mousey portraits are gorgeous. (Modernism Inc., San Francisco

Lurid Gothic romances rapidly became a craze and many early examples are on show: William Beckford's Vathek - a later German edition with a hair-raising illustration by Gottfried Helnwein;

Strangeness and beauty are hallmarks of Helnwein's art. Helnwein's work is for grown-up audiences that know people are capable of the most horrible and the most uplifting things imaginable. The art world has long fallen for Helnwein's work. In its permanent collection, the de Young Museum has a stunning 8-by-10-foot Helnwein painting called Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds), which depicts a room full of Nazi guards smiling and guffawing over a dark-haired Aryan boy held by a young, bare-breasted woman. Adoration of the Shepherds offers a tense, discomforting scene — beautifully drawn, with darkness and lightness exaggerating sightlines and perspective

Modernism’s 1982 Andy Warhol exhibition — the first time the Pop artist’s work was shown on the West Coast — has gone down in local cultural history as emblematic of Muller’s tendency to be at least one step ahead of the city’s artistic leanings. In addition to mounting 18 retrospectives of the Russian avant-garde, Modernism was the first California gallery to show the works of architect Le Corbusier, fashion photographer and Dada collagist Erwin Blumenfeld and Viennese conceptual artist Gottfried Helnwein, whose paintings are currently on view.

Both children and toys wear exaggerated expressions, but expressions that do not seem unnatural to them; if anything, they seem tempered, the toys' by the crepuscular light Helnwein throws around them and the kids' by the odd lack of hyperbole which such pre-teens - especially girls - are normally wont to display. These girls seem truly apprehensive, doubtful, suspicious, frightened, disbelieving, even slightly shell-shocked. Yet Helnwein does not exploit their seeming fragility so much as commute it to us; the way he paints these quietly fearful children provokes not our sympathy but our empathy. We take a more doting view of the several girls' faces with their eyes closed (two of them in the dark), but amidst their wide-eyed sisters, the sleep of these innocents also seems fleeting.

Collectors are willing to pay steep prices for the world’s finest art and photography books. We’ll be showcasing signed rare editions from the likes of Duane Michals, Gottfried Helnwein, Irwin Olaf, Mei Xian Qiu, Sebastiao Salgado, Viviane Sassen and many more. Sometimes these books have captured an era or a location, sometimes they have helped to coin an artistic trend, most often they are simply the finest work of a particular artist or photographer.

Gottfried Helnwein's images of children reckon with innocence and victimization. His Holocaust work is a horrifying wake-up call beneath a hyperrealist guise. There's more dynamism in Hanson's earlier pieces, which captured race riots and the Vietnam war in enormous tableaux. His 1965 "Abortion" scandalized the art world, catching a reality that shook visitors instead of letting them glide casually away.

I have to say that the film is technically brilliant. It's beautiful and the editing is amazing. I want to ask you about some of the visual references. Was there something that you had in mind as visual inspiration? V: One of the visual inspirations was an Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein. How do I describe his art... a pop artist? He is very famous...

In an age with an intense focal point of digitalization, Vivant Books has successful seeped through the cracks to present us with fine art in a way that's elegant, inventive and refreshing. Upcoming Vivant Books will feature artist Gottfried Helnwein.

Kent Logan, a San Francisco collector, amasses his art in true corporate fashion: with flow charts mapping what he has and what he doesn't. His most extensive acquisitions include, below from left, Francesco Clemente's Self-Portrait (1984), Mark Tansey's Occupation (1984), Cindy Sherman's Film Still #6 (1977), Gottfried Helnwein's Untitled (Child) (1996) and Anselm Kiefer's Operation Sea Lion (1975).

A castle in Tipperary is the setting for this most unlikely of squires. Politics, paint and provocation are the life blood of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein and his work.

Playing at top proficiency, The Scorps used the video displays to impressive effect, showing images of a giant peace sign above the Berlin Wall during the soaring “Winds of Change”; Meine’s visage behind an American flag during “Coast to Coast”; and the “Blackout” cover of artist Gottfried Helnwein with his head wrapped in gauze with forks across his eyes.

Gottfried Helnwein, an artist who worked on a book with Dietrich and was in close contact for the past six years, says he never saw her. She was in the bedroom and we were in the other rooms. She would write little notes and put them under the door. She wanted the world to remember her with this beautiful, artificial face created by Sternberg."

The first exhibition in the new space celebrates the gallery’s 37th anniversary with a solo exhibition of works by a gallery stalwart, the iconoclastic Gottfried Helnwein.

AN innocent child caught up in war is the peculiarly appropriate focus of a work by the artist Gottfried Helnwein entitled The Disasters of War which comes up at Sotheby’s Irish art sale in London on September 13. The painting is not about Syria, it is about humankind.

The world can be a frightening place with all the horrors of war, exploitation and poverty. But we're often guilty of turning a blind eye to what's happening all around us, unless of course we're confronted with a child's own suffering – that's when we're inclined to really sit up and take notice. It's perhaps why renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein paints youngsters in his provocative works, showing their pain and stolen innocence to remind us of our societal failures.

Washington/Wien (APA) - Donald Trump wird der nächste Präsident der USA. Der republikanische Kandidat setzte sich in der Nacht auf Mittwoch gegen seine demokratische Kontrahentin Hillary Clinton durch. Die APA - Austria Presse Agentur hat aus diesem Anlass österreichische Künstler und Kulturschaffende zum Ausgang der Wahl befragt und dokumentiert nachfolgend die Antworten.

Ubers lined up like limos at the grand opening of Modernism on Feb. 9. Bohemian clubbers and nightclubbers stood shoulder to shoulder to see Gottfried Helnwein’s paintings of children smeared in blood, wrapped in bandages and pointing automatic weapons at them.

The daughter of Gottfried Helnwein - a remarkable, often controversial force within the art world - and is now an established artist in her own right.

“Downtown 21,” a print by a local artist, Gottfried Helnwein. It’s a moody-spooky portrait of downtown L.A., looking down an alley space with mysterious figures. One can ascribe either malevolence or hope to it. Gottfried collaborated on our 2005 production of “Der Rosenkavalier,” so the piece is meaningful to me.

Brad Pitt battled Arnold Schwarzenegger for the artwork of Gottfried Helnwein "Murmur of the Innocents", which Schwarzenegger won..

Gottfried Helnwein follows the lead of his older Viennese contemporaries Arnulf Rainer and Hermann Nitsch in staging masquerades of suffering for the camera. He is the principal performer in his tableaux, some of which he translates from photograph into painting. Helnwein's first San Francisco show at the Modernism, came well past the moment when art seemed a fit vehicle for facile protestations of disgust at 20th-century history, especially those twisted with irony.

Curator Yazid Anani has brought together a vast pool of artists including Gottfried Helnwein, Khaled Jarrar, Lara Baladi, Larissa Sansour, Sliman Mansour, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Yazan Khalili, and collectives The Convivialist Manifesto, and The Silent University, among others, on the occasion of the new A.M. Qattan Foundation building.

Opium nights at Le Bateau-Lavoir, the dilapidated artists’ residence on the Rue Ravignan in Montmartre, often took place in Pablo Picasso ’s studio. The 24-year-old painter, his girlfriend Fernande Olivier, and one or more of the other artists and writers who lived in the building could be found lying on straw mats around a small oil lamp that cast ghostly shadows on the canvases of sad-eyed acrobats and voluptuous blue nudes stacked against the walls. Slowly, with ritualistic deliberation, they passed around a ceramic pot of the tarry, amber-brown drug; a long, thin needle; and Picasso’s favorite bamboo pipe, its ivory mouthpiece and bowl decorated with enamel and silver.

The three epiphanies of Austrian Irish artist, Gottfried Helnwein, occupy a privileged space within exhibition "Nations Surrogacy" which, until next August, is exhibited in Cultural Center of Foundation Al-Qattan, in Ramallah. His madonnas with a child surrounded by Nazi officials, taken from emblematic scenes of Hitler's regime, will not leave anyone indifferent.

In addition to original animation pieces, artifacts, and film clips illustrating Mickey’s rich history, visitors can see pop art interpretations of Disney’s beloved mouse. Iconic works by Gottfried Helnwein, Damien Hirst, Wayne Thiebaud, and Andy Warhol will be displayed alongside contemporary works

For versatile actor Edward Norton, it could be him playing four pop-culture legends — including Marilyn Monroe — in a re-creation of Gottfried Helnwein’s painting “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” In the composite photo, seen at top, Norton also portrays James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Elvis Presley.

Austrian-born artist Gottfried Helnwein talks to Dónal Lynch about how his country's dark past led to his career, his life in a Tipperary castle, the magic of Irish pub culture and befriending Marlene Dietrich.

Tommy Tiernan welcomes mystery guests and interviews them without any preparation or knowledge of who will be joining him until they meet in studio.

Each item displays the band’s name and logo, with some also featuring a portrait of the band members shot by Gottfried Helnwein.

Nearly two centuries after the great Spanish artist Francesco Goya made the series of prints known as The Disasters of War, eternally preserving the atrocities he witnessed during six years of conflict between Spain and France, Gottfried Helnwein set out to create a new version. Beginning in 2008, Helnwein sought to show that cruelty is not history, and also to shift the focus from battlefield hardships to the inner life of children. "I want to see what's going on through the child's eyes," he says. With that psychological shift came an important permutation in meaning, from graphic accusations of crimes against humanity to metaphors "for the potential of innocence."

When Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein opened a show of his paintings recently, celebrities crowded his downtown studio. Leonardo DiCaprio rubbed Elbows with Marilyn Manson. Beck chatted with Kevin Smith. Mena Suvari stopped for a photo op, and Sean Penn lent his cool. For a recent transplant, Helnwein attracted much Hollywood.

Sean Penn: “I collect one artist - Gottfried Helnwein, simply because I came onto it before it cost too much, I’m always doing movies that I want to do, that therefore pay less than my colleagues’. I’m an appreciator"

Frankfurt, Germany. It was night on the Autobahn and I was going to see Gottfried Helnwein, an artist known as "The Razor-Blade Rembrandt." The artist's assistant, Heinz, was pushing the new Mercedes to 100 miles an hour. This unnerving high-speed delivery, on a highway built by Hitler, seemed an appropriate prelude to meeting an Austrian whose art is a biopsy of post-war Germany, with references to resurgent fascism, mass insanity, suicidal depression and childhood trauma.

Der Gemeinderat von Bleiburg (Bezirk Völkermarkt) hat am Mittwoch Gottfried Helnwein zum Ehrenbürger der Stadtgemeinde ernannt. Diese Verleihung erfolge „in Hochachtung für sein herausragendes künstlerisches Wirken und seiner Verdienste um die Kulturstadt Bleiburg/Pliberk“.

From the conflict in Ukraine to the last days of Scott Morrison’s reign, Russ Radcliffe rounds up the year’s sharpest political cartoons. This is an edited extract from this year’s collection – the 20th anniversary edition.

A Mickey Mouse titled Burgundy Mouse 2 from 2014, suggesting - in typical Helnwein manner - subtle violence beyond the ideal comic (children’s) world, achieved 182,000 euros, setting a world record price.

Marlene Dietrich's last years were very lonely, according to Gottfried Helnwein, a German painter and photographer. She trusted very few people. But she still had her sharp, sarcastic sense of humor...

The Albertina exhibition, in whose creation Helnwein actively collaborated, is a cross-section of the production of the last twenty years, with powerful hyper-realistic paintings with explosive expressiveness.

Er ist einer der bedeutendsten österreichischen Künstler: Der Schockmaler Gottfried Helnwein wird auch bei der Kulturhauptstadt Salzkammergut 2024 für einen Höhepunkt sorgen. Er verhüllt Häuser in Gmunden, zudem wird es eine Ausstellung geben, wie wir bereits berichteten.

“This is a very serious and somewhat disturbing exhibition,” said Mayor Meralee Goldman, who is supportive of the exhibit and was first approached by the Austrian artist. “There is an important component of education to go along with this exhibit,” Human Relations Director Mary O’Gorman said. “This is a Holocaust Memorial, and the intent at times is to overwhelm.” The exhibit is described as “an art event to focus the conscience of the viewer and, through media exposure, the conscience of the widest possible public” by the artist’s draft proposal. “An art installation a city block long...will rise into public view to cry out against not only one of history’s most tragic and horrific episodes of prejudice, but also against the current resurgence of the endangerment of children through intolerance around the world.”

It’s time to strike a blow against Americans’ obsession with self-denial.

In fact Gottfried Helnwein made his name by spectacular performances, among them are self mutilations or simulacra of violence inflicted on himself. The violence is often concentrated on the eyes. The artist takes to bandaging the head which deprives the individual of all visual relations with the outside world. An obvious paradox on the part of an artist's whole life and work is closely linked with sight, to apply himself to representing, in various forms, impediments and problems of sight. Undoubtedly the scope of his projects is not limited to the sole artistic domain. His art also takes on an obvious historic dimension. Like a good number of artists of his generation, those born after the war, be they writers, painters, film makers or photographers, Gottfried Helnwein feels intense guilt at belonging to a part of Europe with such an unbearable past.

Art critic Klaus Honnef lauded Helnwein as "the legitimate air to Beuys and Warhol, " highlighting his ability to defy the artistic boundaries of the social and political realm." After posing for a photographic portrait in 1990, William Burroughs said of Helnwein’s work, " You can’t show anyone anything he hasn’t seen already, on some level any more than you can tell anyone anything he doesn’t already know. It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition to show the viewer what he knows but does not know what he knows. Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition.

Hyperreal kids, blood, bandages, Disney nightmares: Gottfried Helnwein is back in the spotlight – and collectors are paying big money while TikTok turns his paintings into pure shock content.

Hyperreal kids, blood-red drama, and museum-scale shock value: Gottfried Helnwein is the artist you can’t unsee – and collectors are paying serious money for the trauma.

Some of his work is disturbing to say the least, and has been described as "the visual equivalent of a contact sport". He uses art as a way to fight back at society, his pictures forcing people to face things they might prefer to forget about. Children feature heavily, as do bandages and chilling images from the wartime era. All very challanging, yet fascinating.

A major controversy has erupted over plans to hang huge paintings outside City Hall during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Examples of the paintings to be displayed were shown to members of Kilkenny Corporation on Monday night and it sparked uproar in the chamber. Cllr Paul Cuddihy rose to his feet and said that the city would be seen to be promoting the people responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust if paintings like the one handed out at the meeting were allowed to be displayed outside City Hall. He was referring to a controversial picture by Gottfried Helnwein, the internationally acclaimed Austrian artist who wants to display his work in the city during the Arts Festival. Arts Minister, Sile de Valera had already given the green light to hang some of his latest pieces from the front of Kilkenny Castle.

A controversial "Nazi" image by artist Gottfried Helnwein was daubed with red paint last week as Kilkenny Arts Festival entered its final days. Another Helnwein print, of a local girl, was set on fire and extensively damaged.

Cover: "Kindskopf" ("Head of a Child"), photography by Gottfried Helnwein 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.

Alisa Shorr glanced at the teenager with a look of disbelief. "This is dope," the 17-year-old boy was exclaiming as he looked at the images in the University of Arizona Museum of Art's latest exhibits, "Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation" and "Wit's End: The Art of Laughs, Giggles, Cackles and Guffaws." "I had never heard that before" uttered in the museum, said Shorr, the museum's spokeswoman. The double display, on exhibit until Jan. 25, is attracting plenty of interest among teens and young adults who normally avoid the museum. Young people are drawn to the exhibits because both employ comic images - familiar and new cartoon characters - to address serious topics: war, violence, ethnicity, gender, loss of innocence. Gottfried Helnwein's "American Prayer" incorporates a floating Donald Duck in a young boy's evening prayers, while Phillip Knoll asks the question "What if Superman flew naked?" in his sparse "Real and Imagined."

A spokesman for the festival said they were "disappointed and saddened" that the images had been attacked. He said Mr Helnwein's work had provoked a strong reaction throughout the festival. "There have been a lot of positive comments but there has been negative reaction as well." The images have been a major talking point since before the festival began. A former mayor of the city, Mr Paul Cuddihy, initially objected to a painting being hung on the City Hall for fear it might be misinterpreted as lending support to Nazism. After meeting Mr Helnwein at his studio in Co Tipperary, however, Mr Cuddihy said the artist's work was "astonishingly good". Kilkenny Arts Festival said the artist had a long and acknowledged record of taking a firm stand against Nazism and fascism.

We have seen something of the 'look' created via Manson's collaboration with artist Gottfried Helnwein - While the Album remains a sealed box in musical terms, Manson will wax lyrical about the inspirations and influences that helped shape it. There are the people - as well as Calloway, he nods to Oscar Wilde and the loose collective of radical artists and agents provocateurs - collaborator Helnwein among them - who were dubbed the Viennese Actionists. " The Grotesque Burlesque takes what we've done in the past and brings it to a completely different level. This is making everyone a part of your creation. It's realising that art is more than music, more than people listen to it, more than people who play it - it is the combination of all that. Gottfried Helnwein is someone who knows how to artfully provoke. He would take some of his creations and he'd bring them out into the streets. It became an instance where people wouldn't know what was the show and what wasn't the show. That's such a beautiful thing. It's like being in the playground - you're not really sure who's on what team, or what the real objective is.

The art in the loft is primarily representational and often haunting, veering towards an eerie hyperphotorealism. A large painting by Gottfried Helnwein shows a group of men - perhaps doctors or veterans of war - surrounding the body of a young girl on an examination table. They gaze directly at the viewer, as if posing . It could be an antique photograph - the men are from another time - but for the disfigured faces of the physicians. "I don't think they know how they look," says Lee.

His private collection of abstract expressionists, contemporary and Native American art is considered by dealers and curators to be one of the nations best, and he has seats on the boards of the museums of modern art in San Francisco and New York. Much of his collection, including works by Wayne Theibaud, Naomi Kremer, GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN and Nathan Oliveira, is on display throughout the company's offices. In November, Sotheby's will hold a sale of more than 20 abstract works owned by Weisel. The paintings are expected to fetch as much as $60 million.

No better way was this shown than with the giant canvasses draped along the castle and around the streets of the city. For those who didn't know the work of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, his huge pictures of local children were a delight. The canvasses showing images from the Nazi era just left them confused, but the throngs who visited Kilkenny during the weekend snapped away with their cameras all the same. Ms Anne Quiggle who was on a tour from Minnesota wasn't impressed, however. "It doesn't belong on the castle. It's ruining the view," she said. Ms Joni Delaney O'Connell, the tour organiser, said the Nazi images were just "too political" for an arts festival. Mr Seamus Raben from Celbridge came to see Helnwein's work. "The craftsmanship is outstanding, and it's great how he involves himself with the local community," he said.

PRESENT: A crowd described as groovy and Hollywoodish -including actor/skateboarder Jason Lee - turned up Thursday for the opening of Austrian-born L.A.-and-Ireland resident Gottfried Helnwein's show at Modernism in San Francisco. Sean Penn was said to have bought three paintings.

THE FRENCH SAY, "CONDEMNANT IL FAIT Q'UOD": "WE CONDEMN WHAT WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND." BUT THAT STOPS RIGHT HERE. LAY YOUR OPINIONS OF THE MAN TO REST UNTIL AFTER YOU'VE READ THE ENTIRE CONVERSATION BETWEEN CYRIL HELNWEIN AND MARILYN MANSON - Manson: Of course, for everybody who reads this – they won’t know that our meeting has been very important to my career, because you introduced me to your father (Gottfried Helnwein) and we'’ve gone and will go on to do lots of great stuff together. So that’s the behind-the-scenes story for everybody who’'s going to read this..

To help promote their controversial film, "Rules of Attraction", writer/director Roger Avary and producer Greg Shapiro contracted artist Gottfried Helnwein to create an image for the poster. Helnwein chose to recreate a scene where a girl commits suicide and Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) discovers her body. In the studio shot, it almost looks like Sossamon is kissing the dead girl. Since the suicide is a wrist slitting in the bathtub, the girl is nude and therefore the shot couldn't be used for wide release posters. The one you see displayed in theaters features stuffed animals in compromising positions, but Helnwein's poster did make it onto the soundtrack CD and other outlets. Helnwein himself spoke with Madblast about his work.

A controversial mural by Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein has been damaged at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Huge canvases of his work, depicting images of Nazi soldiers staring adoringly at modern Madonna and Child figures, were displayed on various buildings in Kilkenny during the festival. One of the murals hanging at the front of Kilkenny castle had paint thrown at it sometime during the night. Another picture by Mr Helnwein, featuring a young Kilkenny girl, was also partially damaged in another part of the town.

Once an agitated spectator wondered how an apparently nice man could produce such disturbing imagery. Helnwein replied: "What bothers you is the pictures that get triggered in your own head." Perusing a catalogue of his work in preparation for a meeting is a journey through disgust, fear, fascination and admiration to finally - almost - attachment.

Gottfried Helnwein: Called the 'Razor Blade Rembrandt' or 'the Boris Karloff of Art', Helnwein is the man most Austrians love to hate. He schocks people. His paintings are scenes from every-day life, highly realistic, but there's a sharp, morbid streak in many of them. Children with razors, faces under extreme stress or in fear or in pain. Intensly human, often savage, but always stunning. I found him to be a sensitive, warm human being.

A former mayor of the city, Mr. Paul Cuddihy, objected to a proposal to display one of the images on the City Hall after it was shown to members of Kilkenny Corporation on Monday night. After visiting the artist at his home in Co.Tipperary, however, the Fine Gael councillor said Mr. Helnwein was an "astonishinlgy good" artist whose works would have a "huge visual impact" on next month's festival.

The ceremony was held at the Nacional theatre and broadcast live on cable TV channel Canal (á). Following are the winners in the different categories: - Best actress in a fringe show: Belén Blanco for "Kleines Helnwein"

A year or so back, an exhibition called Sensations caused a few upsets, first in London and then in New York. Central to the reaction was a large-scale portrait of a child-killer assembled from, if I remember correctly, the palm prints of children. So far, so bland. The shock element in art has been much talked about in the last five years but art that actually shocks has been thin on the ground during the same period. Step forward then, Gottfried Helnwein. By and large, if art is going to shock, it better have something shocking to say,and it's clear that Helnwein has found that.

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Marilyn Manson: About a year ago, I hooked up with Gottfried Helnwein, and he and I have been working together on various projects that, again, cross the boundaries between photography, painting, film, and installation. It's part of what I'm going to unleash and put into effect as the next couple of months unfold. It's stuff that people dont get to see anymore; it's stuff that happened in the '30s, '40s, '50s and even the '60s with the Panic Movement and Action. Gottfried really pushes the envelope, not just for shock value but for the betterment of art, to make people want to have style because they like it, not because they want to impress other people, to want to be creative because it feeds them and it makes them exist.

Van de Griff's sixth annual realism invitational show presents works by more than 30 artists including photorealism pioneers Don Eddy and Gottfried Helnwein as well as Alessandro Papetti, Janine Stern, Richard Thomas Davis, Deborah Deichler, Dan Griggs, Tony Ryder and Woody Gwyn.

(Picture of Gottfried Helnwein's "Angel Sleeping") Visitors to the Robert Sandelson Gallery in London get a taste of what art will look like in the future with Angel Sleeping (right), by Gottfrid Helnwein, and Double Date Series/ the Club (left), by Micha Klein Mark Chilvers

With an open letter and the picture of a dead child lying with its head in a plate of poisoned food "Lebensunwertes Leben" (Life Unworthy of Life) he protests against Austria's number one forensic psychiatrist, the former euthanasia doctor, Dr. Gross, who admitted in an interview that in the Nazi era he had poisoned hundreds of children and called this method of killing humane.

A Helnwein exhibition in the Gallery of the "House of the Press" in Vienna, headquarters of Austrias biggest newspapers, is discontinued after five days because of strong protests by visitors and employees and finally strike threats by the workers council

The major art works of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, at Kilkenny Castle, Butler House and throughout the city are beautiful, prosaic, sinister, grotesque, unusual and ordinary and provoked a lot of discussion and disgust.

This was the moment when I sensed for the first time," Helnwein has since written, "[that] you can change something with aesthetics, you can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the powerful and strong to slide and totter, anything actually if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means." For the following three-and-a-half decades he has relentlessly pursued that goal, masterfully incorporating everything from painting to performance to photography, regularly causing art world outcry and public fury. Yet as his knockout exhibition at Modernism last October made clear, his art is successful less for its evident tendency to provoke than for its extraordinary ability to perplex.

In 1969 Helnwein painted a portrait of Adolf Hitler and was expelled from the art school on the grounds that any remainder of the National Socialist era was not only damaging to the school but to society at large. Repression of National Socialism had been official government policy, in which the Austrian people were complicit. Based on this situation, Helnwein developed a visual language of apocalyptic visions that can be understood all over the world.

You'd expect Marilyn Manson's wedding to be a headline-grabbing, shock gothic circus of an event. Instead, his wedding to girlfriend Dita Von Teese was a fairytale set in an Irish castle - although he couldn't resist wearing black. Some 60 guests, including Lisa Marie Presley, attended the bash at Castle Gurteen in County Tipperary - home of the Mansons' friend, artist Gottfried Helnwein.

The multi-day event — held at de La Poer Castle, County Tipperary, Ireland, home of the couple's friend, controversial Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein — included a non-denominational ceremony performed by Chilean underground film director (and Manson friend) Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the bride and groom exchanged personal vows. Manson and Jodorowsky, who directed "Santa Sangre," had been working together on a movie called "Abelcain," a project that has been suspended for the time being.

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it. I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does. Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas. A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this. This level of work is earned." Sean Penn