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Renowned Austrian-born artist, Gottfried Helnwein has committed himself and his art to reminding the world of the Holocaust. His exhibit, Ninth November Night, consists of 20 large panels of children's portraits displayed in commemoration of Kristallnacht. "Ninth November Night" was originally displayed in 1988 in Cologne, Germany. Days into the exhibit, the paintings were vandalized by neo-Nazis.
This exhibit will have its American premiere in Philadelphia in November, 2008 ...

Von 21. Oktober 2008 bis 4. Februar 2009 setzt die Albertina die Ausstellungsserie fort, die sie im Vorjahr begonnen hat. Unter dem Titel „Kunst nach 1970.II Aus der Albertina“ werden rund 150 Werken präsentiert, die einen Einblick in ihre große Sammlung an Gegenwartskunst der Albertina geben. In diesem Jahr wird besonders Augenmerk auf die österreichischen Künstler gelegt. ...

Artists are the visual, verbal, and audio guardians of our collective consciousness. For example, few can remember the politics or history of 18th century Europe, but the music of Mozart and the paintings of Watteau continue to be a source of inspiration. We might not always like the message, but it is artists that distil the essence of an era. They serve as thoughtful messengers to a sometimes unperceptive present but an often receptive future.

Robert Flynn Johnson ...

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İstanbul Modern, Orhan Cem Çetin ve Murat Germen'in yönettiği, ayda bir kez gerçekleştirilen olan Çağdaş Fotoğraf Serileri’ne devam ediyor. İzleyicilerden aktif katılım beklenen bir tartışma ve paylaşma platformu olan Çağdaş Fotoğraf Serileri’nin 19 Temmuz tarihinde gerçekleştirilecek buluşmasında tartışma konusu, Avusturyalı çağdaş sanatçı Gottfried Helnwein olacak. ...

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The exhibition Angels Sleeping is a thematic cross-section, predominantly of the painting work of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. The five sections of the exhibition present the fundamental circuits of Helnwein’s work. The introduction comprises heads – faces, including the artist’s iconic self-portrait, painfully acute metaphors of the limits on freedom of expression in Austria in the 1970s and 80s. The artist’s merciless approach to the residues of the Nazi past of his country is a further theme, developed in monochrome, hyperrealistic painting. The central and still extremely relevant theme of Helnwein’s work however is das malträtierte Kind, the child exposed to suffering. The author engages with this theme in various positions from his early works from the 1970s up to the present day. His collection of works on this theme is given the largest space. Violence committed against children, in contrast with their passive exposure, distressed astonishment and impossibility of defending themselves against the world of adults is partially shifted into a further position, ironically entitled Art in Amerika. This presents the relationships of the white, frequently uniformed “majority” to other ethnic groups and minorities, particularly in the United States, sharpened by the photographic precision of the images. ...

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Chargesheimer, Claude Fauville, Bettina Gruber, David Hockney, Jürgen Klauke,
Floris M. Neusüss, Herbert Döring-Spengler,Gottfried Helnwein, u.a. ...

Various themes and concerns are explored by the artists including gender, social, and ethnic identity perception of the self (Su-en Wong); distortions of scale (Eisenman and Philips); use of cartoon or highly stylized imagery (Wesley, Ali, Fujita, Ofili); utilizing the superhero image (Warhol and Ramos); revisiting the Surreal figure (Tyson, Dingle, Quinn, Gormley); composite images of fictional characters (Kauper, Yuskavage, Currin, Lijun, Schütte); emotionally charged faces and forms (Flannigan, Gottfried Helnwein); a twisted notion of reality that reflects a dark world view (McLane, Middlebrook); images of the human form moving through time and space (Herring, Nauman); and the spirit of Neo-expressionism (Clemente, Brown). ...

Helnwein was deeply influenced by the Holocaust, as well as by popular cultural references like comics and rock music. His imagery is unsettling, dark, and deeply compelling, carrying powerful messages of political disturbance and social unease. ...

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Gottfried Helnwein's classic yet unnerving images transform sentimental representations of childhood into portraits of individual subjects frozen at the moment of suffering. His photo-paintings pirouette on the fine line between chocolate box pictures/excessive sentimentality and the cost to children of being treated as commodities, of suffering emotional or physical pain at a grown-up's hands.
High pictorial and technical values create compositions that recall contemporary cinema and seventeenth-century painting, expanding the treatment of time into epic. This apparent grandiosity plays against the immediacy of each suffering subject, underlining the different experience of time in childhood. Small hurts can devastate when you're a child. Big hurts stay with you for years, as survivors of Hitler's Anschluss testify.
Now, in the age of virtual use and abuse of children, Helnwein's insistence on valuing the humanity and charm of the littlest, the least powerful, offers a counterpoint to claims that suffering counts most when you're grown-up. It opens his practice into a series of pictorial mise-en-scènes, as did Rembrandt's tableaux in The Blinding of Samson (1636) or The Night Watch (1642). ...