Tank Magazine, Issue 6, London – August 31, 1999
Tank Magazine, London, 1999
GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN
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.
In 1965, when the seventeen-year old Gottfried Helnwein began his artistic training in Vienna, the Austrian Freedom Party put up posters, demanding, "Forget about the past! Look ahead to the future!" Just a few days earlier the anti-fascist Ernst Kirchweger had died of severe injuries inflicted by violent right-winged extremists during a demonstration against National Socialism.
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.
The Apokalypse exhibition - a title interpreted by the artist to mean "a revelation of the last of things" - in the Dominikanerkirche in Krems was in preparation during NATO's war against Serbia, when news about the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo were broadcast hourly. As the people living in the Balkan peninsula are traumatized for the third time this century, there is no reason for an artist like Gottfried Helnwein to make any other kind of work.
