I first came across Gottfried Helnwein’s extraordinary art while flipping through a coffee table book of his work in summer of 2000. Soon after, I was directing a music video for Peter Gabriel and some of the images that came into my head were impenetrably influenced by the Helnwein paintings and photographs I’d seen. I reached out to Gottfried and asked if he might be interested in collaborating on that video, helping me to bend the form of human faces from their external to their internal truths.  It was in the course of collaborating on this project that I came to assume a deeper understanding and appreciation for Gottfried’s work at large. It’s provocative, controversial, sometimes even horrifying.  
But for me, as human and inspired as any art may aspire to be, I think it’s fair to say that Gottfried Helnwein is as great a living artist as we have today.

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.

I remember when Ramsey Clark said that the poets were the unacknowledged legislatures. And certainly they are. Great art has an undeniable truth. It lets each individual adapt their own experience to that truth but it doesn't let you walk away from it. Somehow, with every great work of art, there is a step in the evolution of man, and I'm not embarrassed to consider it that way. Especially not on the level that Helnwein operates on.

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.

I've made it a conscious effort to not analyze anything I love too much. And I love this art, and for me part of the reason is a professional reason - for me as somebody who aspires to creativity myself. When you find someone in the arts, whether it's in your medium or in another medium, that raises the bar for you, that reinvigorates your own pursuit of affecting people and out of a sharing what you count on as some kind of a common chord in us. Whether it's through imagery, words or sounds.
As an artist my strongest reaction to Helnwein's work is that it challenges me to be better at what I do. There are very few people that achieve utter excellence in what they do, - and I think that Gottfried Helnwein is certainly one of those people.

It has been described that the artist's place on the planet is to be the canary that's sent down into the coal-mine to sniff out whether the air down there is poisonous. And if the canary comes up alive we can all go there. It takes a particular canary to sniff that out, and I think Gottfried keeps coming back up to the surface no matter how poisonous the air and that gives us a lot of belief in our own ability to do it and to reconcile things.

A close examination of his work exposes the deep insight and generosity that lives in his heart, mind, and hand. I could go on, adding my own speculative or theoretical perspective on his work, but my memory of my own experience, first traveling the pages of that book, is precious enough that a better choice would be to step aside and not trespass as you take your own journey through this great artist’s work.


Sean Penn