The thing you should know about this "Rosenkavalier" is that it is terrific. Richard Strauss' opera sounds great and looks sensational. It is excellently sung, sumptuously conducted by Kent Nagano and, thanks to Gottfried Helnwein, wondrously strange.
Helnwein — the Austrian artist (painter, photographer, performance artist, filmmaker) who has a studio in downtown L.A. — is known for everything from Marilyn Manson videos to Holocaust installations. He is responsible for the sets, costumes and that ad (which, by the way, looks like an image from a recent staging of a Schumann oratorio that Helnwein designed in Düsseldorf).
Helnwein's vision of "Rosenkavalier" is monochromatic and a riot of color. It is oddly traditional yet seriously odd. It is updated but couldn't be more 18th century. And none of those opposites contradicts. ...

While it is a painting, Epiphany is typical in its almost interchangeable use of photography and painting: both played their part in the achievement of the eventual, quasi-photographic image. He is a fine photographer, and his photographic portraits of Kilkenny children (enlarged to an enormous scale) form one strand of his festival exhibitions. The careful adaptation of existing imagery is another trait, and his references extend back through fine art history as well as history itself... ...

"For me, art is a way to fight back against everything I've experienced: I wanted to respond, but I didn't know how to articulate it. But I could paint it. That medium opened all doors. Certain images can reach so deeply into people's souls.
"And I feel also like a witness to my times - that's my duty, my responsibility." One role of art, he believes, is to "force people to look at things they would rather not look at," an impulse he sees in Goya and Shakespeare. ...

« L'intolérance et la violence sont les thèmes qui m'intéressent, mais aussi les icônes de notre temps : les idoles. » Depuis 1980, Helnwein travaille à une série appelée « Visages ». ...

At nights my room was plunged into a deep, red light - my toys, the furniture, my bed, my hands - everything had the same color and seemed to be made of the same soft material. As though the natural laws were suddenly suspended, all matter seemed to glow from the inside out. The explanation for this red magic was the large illuminated star of the Red Army on the roof of the factory across the street, which poured it’s fire nightly into my room. ...

Nachts war mein Kinderzimmer in ein tiefes rotes Licht getaucht - meine Spielsachen, die Möbel, mein Bett, meine Hände - alles hatte die gleiche Farbe und schien aus demselben weichen Material zu sein. Als wären die Naturgesetze aufgehoben, schien alle Materie von innen heraus zu glühen.
Die Ursache dieser roten Wundernächte war der riesige leuchtende Stern der Roten Armee auf dem Dach der Fabrik gegenüber, der nachts seine Glut in meine Kinderstube goß. ...

"Anna aus, ich glaube, Kiel", war die unübersehbare Hauptfigur bei der Eröffnung der Ausstellung des österreichischen Malers Gottfried Helnwein im Russischen Museum in Sankt Petersburg.
Wenn Kunst aus dem Westen den Weg nach Russland findet - um dort zu bleiben -, stehen zwei den Petersburgern inzwischen wohlbekannte Namen dahinter:
Irene und Peter Ludwig, die dem Russischen Museum wieder eine Schenkung gemacht haben.
Mit jeder seiner exakt gezeichneten Hautporen und jeder Wimper ist dieses Kind Subjekt - und nicht nur einfach Objekt für einen Maler, der Gigantismus mit Detailversessenheit kombiniert.
"Menschlichkeit im Riesenmass", interpretierte Ludwig das Bild. ...

"...When I look at a work of Art I ask myself: does it challenge me, does it touch, move or inspire me? Do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me - do I get excited, upset?
That is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any information about art? I’ve always had a problem with art that you can only understand if you have a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories in general. Most of them are bullshit anyway.
Most critics and theorists have little respect for artists, and I think the importance of theory in art is totally overrated. Real art is self-evident. Real art is intense, challenging, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Like the Blues, a poem of Rimbaud or Rembrandt's late self-portraits.
Art is not logic, and if you really want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something spiritual that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul. Think of Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Mozart, Howling Wolf, Goya, Bukowski or Robert Crumb - do you need to know the theories that some busybodies might attach to their art in order to experience it?
Marcel Duchamp said: "The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity."
These two poles is all you need. ...

...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. ... ...

Ich glaube dass alle Arbeiten eines Künstlers im Grunde immer nur um ein einziges zentrales Anliegen oder Motiv kreisen. Und jedes Werk so etwas wie ein neuer, mehr oder weniger erfolgreicher Versuch ist, diesem Grundthema näher zu kommen, es sichtbar zu machen, zu fassen, zu formulieren, obwohl es im Prinzip immateriell ist und daher nicht fassbar ist und keine Form hat.
Der Amerikanische Sammler Kent Logan hat gesagt, dass das zentrale Thema all meiner Abeiten immer das Kind sei, und er hat 2004 eine Ausstellung mit dem Titel "The Child" im San Francisco Fine Arts Museum mit-initiiert, die genau diesen Aspekt in meinem Werk zeigen sollte. Das Konzept war offensichtlich schlüssig, die Austellung wurde von fast 130 000 Besuchern gesehen und der San Francisco Chronicle bezeichnete sie als die wichtigste Ausstellung eines zeitgenössischen Künstlers im Jahr 2004.
Frau Stella Rollig hat aber auf einen zweiten, ebenso wichtigen Aspekt in meiner Arbeit hingewiesen: das Gesicht. Aus dieser Sichtweise sind meine Arbeiten noch nie gezeigt worden, und beim Zusammenstellen der Bilder für diese Ausstellung ist mir selbst erst bewusst geworden, wie wesentlich dieser Aspekt ist, und plötzlich schienen mir meine Arbeiten nur mehr aus Gesichtern zu bestehen. ...

Her lips are parted and colored a luscious deep red. The pancake makeup on her face gives off a marble-white glow. A jacket, adorned with braided gold epaulets at the shoulders, yawns open, exposing a wide expanse of skin down her chest. She appears to be about 8 years old.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the subject of Gottfried Helnwein's new, large-format digital prints at San Francisco's Modernism Gallery might have alarmed or even scandalized a viewer. Not anymore -- or at least not so reflexively...
Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.
But the most haunting images, here and across town at Modernism, may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes. ...

TOKYO

Interview with Gottfried Helnwein
Interviewer: ITO Toshiharu
Translation: ENDO Tohru
ゴットフリート・ヘルンヴァイン インタビュー
インタヴュアー： 伊藤俊治
遠藤徹　訳 ...

Artist of inner Turmoil.
Gottfried Helnwein's works from the 1980's are represented by the self-portraits in his "Black Mirror" series. However, these works reach far beyond the boundaries of the ordinary self-portrait. They reflect the inner wants and desperation which lies within the viewer's own self. Helnwein points out the new form of the modern self-portrait which involves the creator and viewer alike. ...

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it.
I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does.
Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas.
A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this.
This level of work is earned."
Sean Penn ...

An alternative title to “Angels Sleeping” for this exhibition could be “All Hail to the Wounded Child,” as many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwien’s works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us, not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs and disturbances.
If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition, it would be a long, endless scream. ...

Helnwein steht immer noch am Fenster und sagt: "Van Gogh war klinisch krank. Aber der Schöpfungsprozess war intakt. Interessant, oder?" Dann geht er zum Kamin und macht Feuer. Er trägt drei Goldketten, Turnschuhe sowie natürlich sein berühmtes schwarzes Stirnband. Gottfried Helnwein sieht aus wie ein zu viel Geld gekommener Gangsta-Rapper.
Der Nebel vorm Fenster wird dichter. Regen prasselt auf den Rasen. Ein Dienstmädchen kommt herein, mit Servierwagen. Sie gießt Kaffee ein, der kontinentaleuropäisch, ja österreichisch schmeckt. "Wiener Melange"? "Einspänner"? "Kleiner Brauner"? Die Kellnerin spricht Österreichisch. Wahrscheinlich könnte sie aus dem Stand Marillenknödel zubereiten. Seltsam: Helnwein, glühender Österreich-Hasser wie Jelinek, Bernhard und jeder andere ernst zu nehmende österreichische Künstler, hat sich in Irland ein Privat-Österreich errichtet. ...

Workmen finish one of a series of prints measuring 9.3 metres by 6.2 metres by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein.The prints of Kilkenny children will hang on buildings in Kilkenny as parts of its arts festival beginning on August 10th. ...

Baumgartner Galleries is introducing the work of Gottfried Helnwein, a young Viennese artist who shares what seems to be an Austrian obsession with highly detailed realism - with a surrealistic edge. Trained at the Austrian Academy, and now in the process of moving to New York, Helnwein makes figurative drawings and watercolors that are occasionally gruesome, sometimes haunting and always ambiguous. Spatial and narrative ambiguity are, in fact, the central expressive devices in Helnwein's art. ...

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. ...

Gottfried Helnwein - ein künstlerischer Anarchist aus Prinzip. Seine Bilder erzählen von apokalyptischen Visionen. Schon seit Beginn seiner Karriere ist Helnwein umstritten. Claudia Teissig porträtiert den genialen Blickfänger. ...