The film tells the story of famed Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, obsessed with a mission to use his art to preserve the memory of Holocaust persecutions. ...

...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. ... ...

Er begeistert Kalifornien:
Tausende strömen in die Ausstellung des Österreichischen Malers Gottfried Helnwein im Fine Arts Museum San Francisco.
Helnweins Schaffen wird überall leidenschaftlich diskutiert. Viele bewundern seine aggressiven Bilder, manche sind empört, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hat ihm erst kürzlich einen Sitz im Kunst-Beirat des Bundesstaates Kalifornien angeboten. ...

Editor -- I am writing to suggest that the large image accompanying the review of the Gottfried Helnwein show at the Legion of Honor ("The art of Gottfried Helnwein demands a response," Monday) was inappropriate to place on the first page of the Datebook section, especially above the fold and in such a large format. It is certainly right for art to be dark and disturbing, and certainly right for people to have relatively easy access to art of all kinds -- hey, I'm an ACLU member and an avid fan of some pretty disturbing artists -- but you have to remember that The Chronicle is a family newspaper and that the Datebook section is often the one that children turn to first when they pick up the paper to search for the comics. Anyone with younger children can easily imagine the really horrifying effect this particular image would have. Couldn't you have found an image that would have suggested the nature of Helnwein's art without being such so frightening to children? Barring that, you should have printed it inside the fold and smaller.
Thanks for thinking about the kids next time.
Leif Brown
Berkeley ...

Visitors to Gottfried Helnwein's show of panoramic landscapes at the Crawford Municipial Gallery in Cork are having trouble deceiding either they are looking at paintings or photographs. Some are up to seven metres in length, by two metres wide:
a breathtaking, epic scale. They are extraordinarily beautiful, by any standards, and, yes, they are paintings.
The finish may be photorealist, but these are not direct transcriptions of what the camera lens sees; they are edited and informed by the artist's eye.
Take a close look at Irish Landscape III (Nire Valley) or Irish Landscape IV (County Waterford). Nor do they represent what the naked eye can see. American Landscape (Death Valley) is so wide that it has an almost vertiginous effect.
Dawn Williams who curated this show has done a superb job. ...

Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. His work is hauntingly gorgeous and suffused with pathos, precisely because viewers are immediately aware of the larger threat that looms within the pieces: the rupture of innocence. ...

Die Maschine, die immerfort höchste Qualität produziert, kann nicht still stehen.
Gottfried Helnwein, 56, arbeitet auch im Sommer wie ein Besessener. Der Österreichische Maler, einer der spärlichen heimischen Weltstars seiner Profession, eröffnet soeben im "Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco" seine erste amerikanische Einzelausstellung.
Verstörte, verwundete, misshandelte Kinder: das Thema lässt ihn seit den österreichischen Anfängen in den siebziger Jahren nicht los. Seit fünf Jahren bereitet er eine Retrospektive im Nationalmuseum von Peking vor, im Mai zeichnete er für die Ausstattung des Oratoriums "Das Paradies und die Peri" beim Schumannfest in Düsseldorf verantwortlich.
Und derzeit arbeitet er am Bühnenbild für den "Rosenkavalier", den Maximilian Schell an Placido Domingos Opernhaus von Los Angeles inszeniert. ...

...

Helnwein's preoccupation with the dark side of modern history, including its abuse of images, has never left him. He did a whole series of paintings (the Legion show includes a couple) so dark as to appear imageless. But he intended them not as mirrors of dark times but as counterthrusts to the aggressive reach of so much contemporary culture.
Despite the grotesquerie it contains, the Legion show also has elements of pathos.

Helnwein nodded yes when asked whether he has made a theme of innocence. "It's a dangerous word, it's so abused and misused, but yes that's probably the basic essence of what I'm interested in."
"As soon as somebody's grown up they have so many issues," he said. "When you look at a person -- what social level, what country they're from, what fashion they affect -- all this stuff comes in, but I'm interested in the stage of a human being where it's not so important whether it's a male or female, before we can tell any social background or anything, it's just ... abstract, almost."
...Probably few visitors will appreciate the detachment in Helnwein's work. They will more likely respond to his concern with the power of images. We willingly subject ourselves to their power every day without really understanding it. If nothing else, his pictures, no matter how confrontational, stand still and permit us, even defy us, to understand how they work upon us. ...

His show "The Child," at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, comes with the equivalent of a PG-13 rating, for pieces that feature children and themes of emotional and physical pain. He finds the warning ironic, given that the gallery next door is full of Renaissance paintings depicting religious beheadings and stabbings, but has no warnings about violent content.
He knows that his paintings are disturbing ("I'm very bad for people who want decoration," he laughs)
He theorizes that entertainment today is passive, but his art causes people to think and "co-create" to fill in the blanks.

"Any civil society needs provocation and I think the artist, the role of the artist, is also to provoke and challenge people, because every society usually wants to hold on to the status quo,'' he said. "True artists challenge reality. You don't accept it. We want the world different."
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