helnwein archive

The works of Gottfried Helnwein are technically classified as hyper-realism (surpassing super-realism) and at first glance are practically indistinguishable from photographs. Though realistic in terms of technique, most of Helnwein's works are characterized by metaphorical implications.
Among his works, for example, is a painting of a man blindfolded with a bandage around his head. Featured in magazines and newspapers worldwide, looking at this painting may have caused people to feel its unheard cry.
Throughout most of Helnwein's work is the basic principle of realism laced with metaphor. Viewed in this light, this basic principle can be considered, in a sense, metaphorical under the guise of realism. On the contrary, photographs by Helnwein look like paintings with implications.
Included in all of Gottfried Helnwein's work, this basic principle demonstrates a reflection of the aesthetics of popular culture and irony, and represent Helnwein's major outlook on the world.
Gottfried Helnwein is endowed with perfect pitch and distinguished sense of contemporary issues.
As a painter whose art deals with issues confronting human society, Helnwein creates a new standard of measuring modernism.

Curator of 20th Century Art, Phoenix Art Museum
IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL
Rock and Roll Currents in Contemporary Art.
The portraits of Hendrix, Joplin, and Lennon are particulary stirring because their ghostlike treatment translates as a poetic and humble tribute to major creative forces whose lives were tragically cut short. As exemplified by the paintings of Helnwein, the purpose of a contemporary rock and roll portrait may extend well beyond biographical signification to stimulating reflection upon larger issues of social or political consequence.

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.

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.

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.

Gottfried Helnwein im Gespräch mit Andreas Mäckler. Die Interviews mit Gottfried Helnwein fanden statt am 13./14. Juli und wurden am 21./22. September 1990 fortgesetzt

Barks: . . . Ich habe lieber mit der Ente gearbeitet, Donald konnte ich herumstossen, ich konnte ihn verungluecken lassen, ich konnte ihn von einem Felsen fallen lassen, oder was immer ich wollte. Mit Donald war es wirklich lustig.

Barks:... I preferred to work with the duck - I could push Donald around, let him get into an accident, I could let him fall off a cliff, or whatever I wanted.
It was lots of fun with Donald.
With Mickey that would have been dangerous, because he always had to be loved and had to be victorious in all situations. With Donald I had a comedian who I could treat badly and who I could make fun of.

Gottfried Helnwein, An artist reminds society of its past
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.

TANZ 92 im Ronacher: Start mit Kresniks "Macbeth". Sie lieben Schauder, Alpträume, Schocks. Wen wundert's, dass beide bei Shakespeares "Macbeth" zu einem wahren Höhenflug blutiger Phantasie abheben: Österreichs Schockmaler Gottfried Helnwein und der Kärntner Johann Kresnik, Bremens Tanztheaterchef und international bejubelter Choreograf, zeigten nun im Ronacher ihren Bremer "Macbeth". Ein Erfolg für "TANZ 92" - Organisator Gerhard Brunner.