helnwein archive

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.

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.

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 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.

One of the most exciting aspects of prgramming the visual arts for the Kilkenny Arts Festival has to be the organic nature of the event, the opportunity it affords to take ideas and allow them to grow and develop. The interaction between the people involved is what makes these exhibitions so special. In this showing of new and existing works by Gottfried Helnwein what started as a small part of the visual arts programme has, because of the power of the artist and his work and the openness of the whole festival team involved, grown to make a substantial statement and to produce an exhibition that is very particular to this city. Although some of the works have been shown in other cities around the world, the particularity of the chosen sites and the involvement of the local community make this an exhibition not just about the artist and his work, but also about the people of Kilkenny.

Lang anhaltender Applaus, Bravorufe, nicht ein einziges Buh ertönte.
Die Premiere von Strawinskys"The Rake's Progress" in der Inszenierung von Jürgen Flimm an der Hamburgischen Staatsoper fand eine tolle Resonanz beim Publikum .
Musikalischer Leiter war Ingo Metzmacher und der international bekannte Künstler Gottfried Helnwein begeisterte mit seiner Ausstattung.

The art of Gottfried Helnwein cannot be properly considered without surveying the terrain of modern and contemporary art from which it developed. To understand Helnwein is not just to see what movements and artists he embraced and was influenced by, but also what he rejected.
For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission. His art is the visual equivalent of a contact sport. It not only has put Helnwein at odds with much of the history of post-war art, but also has positioned him in the forefront of the highly regarded confrontationalist movements of contemporary art so active in America and Europe today.

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.

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.

(excerpt) Other works in the exhibition present the dark side of cartoon characters. The prevailing narrative structure of many cartoons is a cycle of one's character's unrelenting attacks on another. Yet the violence of these scenarios is subverted and humor achieved by the lack of any permanent injury to the victim and the gleeful nonchalance of the adversary even during the most aggressive assault. Static representations of wounded or menacing cartoon characters can expose the violence and eliminate the humorous punch line. In Gottfried Helnwein's painting Mickey (plate 24), Mickey Mouse's physical features, which usually contribute to his appeal become a thin veneer of looming attack. Blown up to a monster scale and rendered in an austere gray palette, Mickey's smile is deceptive.