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. ...

Helnwein talkes to Olga Buckley ...

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." ...

Jul 2-30 Summer Exhibition Includes works by William Crozier, Gottfried Helnwein and Sarah Walker. ...

"Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes, which are the cornerstone of this Crawford show, are unashamedly aesthetic: gorgeous confections of pure, delicious spectacle. The typically epic but not inhuman scale imitates the subject matter. The tonal realism will make people go "Wow, are they paintings?" - thanks to the photorealist finish which seems free of the foibles of the human hand. Helnwein works with very small brushes - highlighting and subtly magnifying here, muting colours or creating shadows there; pushing some paintings towards momentary sleights of impressionism; and others towards seamless, burnished hyperreality. The bird's eye view suggests a kind of superhuman vision which can simultaneously take in the entire view with breath-taking clarity, like some bionic eagle."
Mic Moroney, from the essay "Out of the Apocalypse into the Sublime - bursting into Irish Landscape: Citizen Helnwein" ...

July – August 2004 ...

* Helnwein's Epiphany I has been up on our site for years now. For a while I used it as wallpaper on my desktop. Perhaps that explains how the first hypertext poem came to be one about the Virgin. But as I struggled with updating the site, I checked all my old resources and came across materials that explain Helnwein's commitments and meanings far better than I could alone. ...

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"When I am reincarnated I want to come back to this castle and relive tonight!"
Nora Owen,
former Minister for Justice of Ireland ...

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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. ...

Ich spüre ein überwältigend emotionales Gefühl, wenn ich im Flugzeug sitze und schaue herunter auf diese kleine grüne Insel Irland. Ich werde so sentimental dass ich Tränen in den Augen habe.
Obwohl ich dort nicht geboren bin, habe ich das Gefühl, ich gehöre zu diesen vielen Iren, die dort seit Jahrhunderten um ihre ihre karge Existenz kämpfen, singen, dichten, saufen und ständig auswandern mussten. Aus irgendeinem Grunde fühle ich mich als Teil dieser eigenartigen und traurigen Geschichte. ...

Most Popular:
* Haring, Keith (1958-1990)@
* Hine, Lewis Wickes (1874-1940)@
* Helnwein, Gottfried (b. 1948)@
* Hirschfeld, Al (1903-2003)@
* Hundertwasser, Friedensreich (1928-2000)@
* Hopper, Edward (1882-1967)@
* Hockney, David@
* Hockney, David (b. 1937)@
* Hunter, Dard (William Joseph) (1883-1966)@
* Hughes, Arthur (1832-1915)@ ...

After rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names of contemporary art as a child, Cyril Helnwein now lives quietly in Ireland, surrounded by a circle of loyal friends -famous or not- close to whom he seems to have foud some kind of serenity. Glitters of fame ? He leaves them to others - who have more time to spend in official receptions and society dinners. Quick interview with a shadow artist who keeps trying to bring our world to light... ...

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group show
Artists support Nazareth House in Cape Town South Africa.
Nazareth House is a world respected organisation dedicated to the stable and secure care of children in need. The Sisters of Nazareth were asked to care for one HIV baby in 1992 and since then, in their centre and their township outreach programmes, they have looked after more than 250 HIV infected babies and children. ...

Helnwein's painting - both cheekily and totally in homage - appropriates the great paintings, "The Polar Sea" (1824) by the leading German Romantic landscape artist Casper David Friedrich. Helnwein here re-renders the painting in a gloomy, cinematic blue-black duochrome, and hugely magnifies it from its original scale (about 1 metre by 1 metre 30), although the foundered ship still seems dwarfed and pulverised by the splintering ice sheets. It remains a fine example of that particularly Germanic celebration of heroic humanity dashing itself against the majestic cruelty of nature.
Helnwein, in his wry title and borrowing of the image, is suggesting an uncomfortable paradigm behind Friedrich's painting - a perpetual sense of momentous revolution within nature, raw humanity and indeed artistic culture. These ideas pervaded Friedrich's work, as well as that of composer Richard Wagner and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche - all of whose works were later so mistakenly absorbed into the "superhuman" aesthetic of Nazi ideaology and doctrine. ...