Deutschbauer:
"Was sind am Schluss eines Buches für gewöhnlich Ihre Gedanken?"
Maler Gottfried Helnwein:
"Ich habe Bücher gern, die mich am Ende hängen, ratlos lassen.
Da fange ich dann an nachzudenken."
Gottfried Helnwein über "Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit" von Marcel Proust.

With ironic images of toys and cartoon figures, a number of contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors take incisive aim at the emotional underbelly of childhood in The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from September 1, 2000, through January 2, 2001. Explaining how these representations question deeply rooted social mores, this exhibition includes over 30 playful and wicked works-drawn from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan-by such contemporary artists as Gottfried Helnwein, David Levinthal, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Laurie Simmons and Hung Tung-lu. As Kent Logan states, "Of the themes in our collection this exhibition will explore what I like to call 'Children's Hour.'" ...

Austrian artist Gottfired Helnwein's powerful and haunting paintings provide a disturbing commentary on Nazism and the Holocaust, regularly provoking outraged reactions from right-wingers in his native land and in Germany. "I was amazed how much pictures could reach into the hearts and minds of people - and how much they would talk to me about it," he told the JC. "For me, art is like a dialogue. My art is not giving answers, it is asking questions." ...

Helnwein, the controversial Austrian artist whose works is currently on show at the Robert Sandelson gallery in London, has always been a difficult personality to pin down.
He chose to exhibit all three "Epiphany" paintings alongside a series of photographs of 19th century stillborn foetuses in an exhibition entitled "Apokalypse". Hung together in a Dominican church in Weinstadt in Austria, the final effect was one of haunting beauty, each child framed magnificently within the high vaulted ceiling of the church. The juxtaposition of these serene yet poignant images of "beings that never were" placed next to paintings that recalled the ideological terrors of the past, created a synthesis of values as politically dynamic as they were aesthetically entrancing. Yet throughout his career as an artist Helnwein has never ceased to use his work as a way to question his immediate surroundings. ...

Kleines Helnwein es la primera obra escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten, hasta el momento un joven asistente a talleres de dramaturgia y actuación. Su fuente de inspiración fue la obra del pintor austríaco Gottfried Helnwein, de quien vio una muestra en Europa, hace tres años. El artista plástico trabajó como escenógrafo en algunas puestas del dramaturgo y director Heiner Müller. El personaje central de su espectáculo surge en escena como escapado de una de las obras del artista para exponer “su distanciamiento ante el dolor y su intimidad, presa en una atmósfera infantil”. En el panel central de la escenografía son proyectados algunos cuadros de Helnwein.
...

“Kleines Helnwein”, escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten. Con Belén Blanco y Martin von Tumpling. Música: Mariano Durand y Marcelo Vignolo. En El Callejón de los Deseos, los viernes a las 21.30.
ADMIRABLE actuación de Belén Blanco en esta pieza fascinante.

Con su impecable dominio técnico, comparable con el de los maestros antiguos, el austríaco Gottfried Helnwein (52) puede ser un agudo pintor mundano y también un minucioso cronista del espanto desatado en el mundo por el afán de poder y la exasperación de la violencia. El joven director, autor y también actor Rodrigo Malmsten, formado, entre otros maestros, junto a Daniel Veronese y Alejandro Tantanián (“El periférico de objetos”), parte de la pintura de Helnwein para mostrar, en forma de drama, cómo esa violencia, impersonal y en cierto modo clínica, degrada al hombre hasta convertirlo en un objeto, en otra máquina de destrucción (y también, naturalmente, de autodestrucción). ...

A year or so back, an exhibition called Sensations caused a few upsets, first in London and then in New York. Central to the reaction was a large-scale portrait of a child-killer assembled from, if I remember correctly, the palm prints of children. So far, so bland. The shock element in art has been much talked about in the last five years but art that actually shocks has been thin on the ground during the same period.
Step forward then, Gottfried Helnwein.
By and large, if art is going to shock, it better have something shocking to say,and it's clear that Helnwein has found that. ...

A blonde Madonna, dressed as if she were spending an evening at the opera, presents her child to the watchful eyes of Nazi SS Guards, One officer looks as if he were studying the child's genitals, perhaps to see whether he has been circumcised. Dark hair parted severely to one side and fleshy baby cheeks lending a slight and comical hangdog expression, the young child presents something of an eerie resemblance to the Führer. ...

The 24-hour city is already a reality for art-lover Lou Reed.
Reed was dining with a friend - the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein - on Sunday night, when he decided he wanted to see Helnwein's new show at the Robert Sandelson Gallery.
"I had just taken to my bed when I got a phone call from Gottfried", says Sandelson. "But I'm an old fan of Lou Reed so I went as I was and opened up at midnight." For nearly an hour, Sandelson stood in his nightwear and "yawned away while they analysed the pictures in detail". ...

Kate Connolly meets Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian who is still confronting his country's Nazi past. It could have been worse. At least he doesn't look like his self-portraits, in which bandages swathe his head, bent forks pull his mouth into a mocking smile and blood drenches his torso. Helnwein, 52, is a master of the scandalous and the art of shocking. The artist Robert Crumb once said of him: "Helnwein is a very fine artist and one sick motherfucker." "You can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the strong and powerful to slide and totter - anything, actually, if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means." ...

Strawinskys Wüstlings-Oper "The Rake's Progress", die Ingo Metzmacher am 10. Juni 2001 gemeinsam mit Jürgen Flimm auf die Bühne hebt.
Als Bühnen- und Kostümbildner fungiert kein anderer als Gottfried Helnwein.
Nach Jörg Immendorfs spektakulärer Salzburger Festspiel-Version eine neue, aufreizende Künstler-Attacke auf das Werk. ...

Helnwein, who grew up in Austria just after the Second World War had, like many others of his generation living in Germany or Austria, found it hard to come to terms with the Nazi past. As with fellow German and Austrian artists Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Hermann Nitsch, there is a sense of being plagued by history in his work, even though he says that art should never be about ideology - "I don't want to teach and explain." ...

This made perfect sense, I thought, considering the visuals attached to their recent album Sehnsucht: portraits of the band by Gottfried Helnwein, the brilliant German artist whose gauze-wrapped and fork-embellished self-portrait had been an album cover for the Scorpions -- you know the one I'm talking about?
Helnwein had photographed the Rammstein faces after mangling and compromising them with arcane medical apparatus; and here I was, with my back mangled and compromised, being photographed by arcane medical apparatus! How very synchronistic it all was!
Why, Helnwein was probably out there right now, conducting the band in their concerted hammerstrikes, perhaps even forming a mini mosh pit with my wife or discussing the finer points of arcane medical apparatus-based face-mangling with the MRI tech! Of course! And there were streamers, too! Multicolored streamers that descended from the antiseptic rafters and twisted and shimmered like silken snakes dancing in time to the music ... ...

...

One piece of public art he did in 1988 - funded fully by himself, after he failed to raise sponsorship - commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. "Again, what amazed me was that nobody talked about it - and yet that was when the horror really started."

"I wanted to do it in front of the Dome in Cologne, but the City prevented it. But there was this little strip of land which belonged to the railways, and a guy who worked there said, 'go ahead'. I didn't want to use these historic photographs which are used too often - those mountains of corpses mean nothing anymore - so I used four metre high children's faces. I photographed children from the area, foreign children, German children, Jews, anything." Mounted in a long billboard line, after the huge word "Selection", the children's faces were powdered in a deathly, bruised way, many with their eyes closed. That may sound subtle, but in the context of muted German Holocaust memorials, it was like a slap in the face. Despite CCTV video-cameras, someone painstakingly sliced the throats of every single child-portrait. ...

These paintings are about America, I guess from a very European point of view.
They're based on photographs, mainly newspaper photographs, of the Fifties and Sixties from archives in New York and L.A. Most people in these pictures are real people, caught in some long forgotten, petty events.
I rearranged the scenes, introduced new characters, and created new relationships and contexts. And then I painted them in black and blue.
That's how I remember America back then in the early Fifties in Vienna, where I was born. The big war had ended a few years ago, but the city still seemed undecided as to whether this was the end of the world or if life should go on.
It was a strange, sad and surreal world. The streets were empty, the houses dark - many of them in ruins from the bombings.
The few people I saw seemed ugly, clumsy, and depressed.
I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard anybody sing. It was a world without sound and colour. Everything moved in slow motion, like slime. We had no phones, no television, no cars, no music, no pictures, except the paintings of tortured people in the Roman Catholic church which made a deep impression on me, haunting me in the sleepless nights of my childhood limbo.
And then, without any warning, suddenly there was America.
When I saw the first picture of Elvis I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.
That was the beginning of the never-ending flood of American images that suddenly came over us and started to penetrate and transform everything. ...

But stand all this beside an Antony Gormley cage figure (White Cube) or the giant paintings of stillborn babies by Gottfried Helnwein, an artist revered in Germany and Austria (Robert Sandelson). ...

(Picture of Gottfried Helnwein's "Angel Sleeping")
Visitors to the Robert Sandelson Gallery in London get a taste of what art will look like in the future with Angel Sleeping (right), by Gottfrid Helnwein, and Double Date Series/ the Club (left), by Micha Klein Mark Chilvers

-La versatilità sperimentale di Helnwein sfugge ad ogni classificazione . spesso ci si dimentica anche del suo coinvolgimento attivo nell'antipsichiatria e contro l'autoritarismo a favore del disarmo e di una maggiore presa di coscienza dei problemi ecologici . Le opere più recenti di Helnwein lo vedono particolarmente attento nel rilevare la sensazione di crisi permanente a livello emozionale , il suo lavoro è carico di quasi tutte le manifestazioni della violenza , storiche e attuali . Il doppio ruolo dell'artista , quale vittima e carnefice , mandante ed esecutore e molte altre metamorfosi ; impersona e rappresenta le forze sociali antagoniste sul palcoscenico della propia coscienza . Con Helnwein e con le generazioni dei trentenni di oggi il sentimento romantico dell'avanguardia ha raggiunto una tensione radicale : l'artista come mancato , deluso avversario del borghese , diventa un martire di una rivoluzione che non ha raggiunto l'emancipazione dell'individuo . Perciò il ritorno del romanticismo porta anche con Helnwein a forzare uno dei suoi aspetti : la stilizzazione sotto forma di autoritratto di una protesta introversa fino al martirio , che storicamente è legato in modo contraddittorio all'opposizione sociale , alla ribellione , all'utopia .
teresa gabanacl@tin.it
il 15/01/00 alle 20:38:19 ...

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