This was the moment when I sensed for the first time," Helnwein has since written, "[that] you can change something with aesthetics, you can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the powerful and strong to slide and totter, anything actually if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means." For the following three-and-a-half decades he has relentlessly pursued that goal, masterfully incorporating everything from painting to performance to photography, regularly causing art world outcry and public fury. Yet as his knockout exhibition at Modernism last October made clear, his art is successful less for its evident tendency to provoke than for its extraordinary ability to perplex. ...

Disney artist Carl Barks (1901-2000) created one of Walt Disney's most famous characters, Scrooge McDuck. Barks also produced more than 500 comic book stories. His work is ranked among the most widely circulated, best-loved, and most influential of all comic book art.
Although the images he created are known virtually everywhere, Barks was an isolated storyteller, living in the desert of California and preferring to labor without public fanfare during most of his career.
The influence of Barks's work on such filmmakers as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and on such artists as Gottfried Helnwein has extended Barks's significance far beyond the boundaries of comics. ...

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. ...

Faкeл: Кто для вас важнее, Адольф Гитлер или Дональд Дак?
Gottfried Helnwein: Конечно, Дональд Дак. Встреча с этим персонажем в возрасте четырех лет была моей первой встречей с великим искусством. Я родился в Вене, оккупированной советскими войсками, сразу после окончания войны. Кругом разбомбленные дома, врослые казались мне разбитыми и угнетенными. Не помню, чтобы в раннем детстве кто-то пел или смеялся. Мир вокруг меня казался немым черно-белым кино в замедленной перемотке. Я чувствовал себя так, будто приземлился на чужой планете, в мире, которому не принадлежу.
Однажды вернувшийся с работы отец бросил на пол передо мной едва ли не первый немецкий перевод комиксов о Дональде Даке. Открыв эту первую в моей жизни книгу комиксов, я открыл дверь в реальный мир. Робко вошел. Я чувствовал себя так, как человек, переживший взрыв на шахте. После долгого пребывания в темноте между жизнью и смертью я вошел в яркий свет Дакбурга, и мои глаза, не привыкшие к такому яркому свету, наполнились слезами. Я глубоко вздохнул, и мои пропыленные легкие наполнились свежим воздухом.
В этом мире все снова обрело свой смысл: люди снова выглядели нормально, у них были желтые утиные клювы или собачьи морды, и каждого из них можно было безо всякого вреда для их здоровья продырявить пулями или раскатать в лепешку гигантским катком. Это был мир красок, скорости, приключений, магии и удивления. Я никогда не отступал назад, в чистилище так называемого "реального мира", и с тех пор Дональд Дак стал для меня неограниченным источником вдохновения. ...

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. ...

『HELNWEIN』 Gottfried Helnwein (98Konemann)
良い子は見ないで下さい
スコーピオンズ『ブラックアウト』 やラムシュタイン『渇望Sehnsucht』のジャケットで有名、ヘルンバインの画集。70年代初期アクション時代から90年代コンピューター処理を経た作品までを網羅した一家に一冊のベスト本！25㎝×32㎝420ページ、重い！テーマは苦しみ、虐待、死、特に児童虐待と内容も重い！
年代順の作品解説、論考？、Ｈ・ミューラー、Ｗ・バロウズの寄稿文が英、独、仏語で載っている。リブロポートから昔出た『ヘルンバイン』を捜し求めるよりはこれを買ってください。私は渋谷パルコブックセンターで￥5000で購入したが、紀伊国屋ネット会員だともう少し安い。最新シリーズはwww.helnwein.comで。 ...

GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN
構成・解説　伊藤俊治
リブロポート
オーストリア＝ウィーンはヤバい芸術家を数多く輩出／排出している。シェーンベルク、ベルク、ウェーベルンら新ウィーン楽派の音楽、シーレ、ココシュカらの表現主義的な絵画、フックスらのウィーン幻想派。
そして、我らがヒーロー、ゴットフリート・ヘルンヴァイン。 ...

Artists in their pusuit to understand themselves and the world around them have been forced to face the pain of suffering.
Helnwein, in his important "American Madonna" (Epiphany IV) painting, depicts with provocation the conflict between men of power and the weak.
In this present day setting, the police are confronting a divine being. ...

Helnwein is famously confrontational, and his bold conflations of Nazi and Christian iconography, in Epiphany and other prominently displayed pictures, predictably generated some friction. Yet, in a way, one shouldn't rush to condemn condemnations of, or expressions or resignation about, Helnwein's work, no matter how superficial or uninformed they turn out to be. Because, let's face it, a large part of its effectiveness had to do with its calculated, barbed ambiguity.
The point of the images is that they put it up to you as a viewer. Given that, one potential line of criticism is that they are designed solely to be provocative, like Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley. But the abiding strength of Helnwein's work is that provocation is a means rather than an end; it is - however uncomfortable - morally grounded, if not necessarily in a way that will please all observers...
His beautiful photographs of Kilkenny children are, collectively, a recognisable derivative of his work Selection, which implicitly placed the viewer in the position of someone marking children for extermination. Strong stuff.
If that seems irrelevant in an Irish context, one could always point to Northern Ireland and to the scandals that have shaken the complacent authority of church and state in recent years.
What is more innocent, more open, more charming than the face of a child? Except that we are more than ever uncomfortably aware that the act of looking is not at all innocent, and Helnwein's children, with their closed, downcast eyes, decline to meet our collective gaze. Why? Perhaps because they insist on remaining within the orbits of their imaginations.
There is also, however, a slight unease arising from the uniformity of the images and the awareness that the subjects are being directed. Helnwein has a knack for throwing responsibility for what we are looking at back onto us, the viewers. ...

Exhibition - catalogue
One man show, Butler House, Kilkenny
Installation in the Kilkenny city center
Introduction by Claire O'Donoghue
Essay by Mic Moroney

Ninety children from around the city and country were photographed by the artist here in the High Street and nine are displayed in central locations around the city, dramatically enlarged up to 9 metres high. This ongoing project, begun here, will continue in other cities and towns in Ireland as the artist intends to expand the work to include one thousand Irish children. These beautiful,confident and happy children from Kilkenny contrast starkly with some of his more disturbing imagery. The juxtaposition of historical photographs of the Nazi regime with religious imagery of the Madonna and Child in the "Epiphany" series can make uneasy viewing not only in Germany and Austria but also here in Kilkenny.
Amongst a number of possible readings of these works is the uncomfortable relationship between the church and oppression in its various forms. However, as the artist Nolde said, "harmless pictures seldom mean anything". Nolde was banned from painting by the Nazi regime. ...

Most of the city pictures emerge from a deceptively simple strand of Gottfried's work, the frank photography of children's faces. He photographed over ninety children in Kilkenny. Now these kids are immortalised, larger than life in their extreme youth, and dotted around the gable-ends and walls of their native town; there eyes closed in beautiful, breathless meditation. Mounted in a manner which is normally the preserve of billboard advertising, these are quietly awesome images of the city's youngest inhabitants. ...

La deuxième Table Ronde sur la médecine a réuni des historiens de la médecine et de l’art, des médecins, des philologues, des étudiants du CESR et de la Faculté de Médecine autour de la notion du symptôme.
Dès l’antiquité, le médecin est amené à observer les signes du corps (tà sêmeia) et à interpréter ceux qui ont une valeur significative pour faire un pronostic correct de l’évolution de l’état des malades (Hippocrate, Pronostic 25). La sémiologie méthodiste garde l’idée que seul un concours de signes est signifiant, mais transfère les signes du malade à la maladie. L’interprétation (significatio) de l’ensemble des signes devient utile au diagnostic (Caelius Aurelianus, Maladies aiguës I, 1). Le terme grec sumptôma dans un contexte médical apparaît chez Galien (De la meilleure des sectes, 21), indiquant « ce qui accompagne la maladie », désignant des différences de grandeur ou de caractère...
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A l’opposé –il n’est pas possible d’affirmer que c’est en réaction–, plusieurs artistes contemporains nous rappellent, par leurs œuvres, ce qui nous fait et qui, montré frontalement, est beaucoup moins édulcoré que le simple produit de paires de chromosomes arrangées dans un ordre impeccable. Qui nous montrent en somme qu’il n’y a, chez l’homme, jamais rien d’impeccable. Il s’agit notamment de Francis BACON, Lucian FREUD, Gottfried HELNWEIN, Joël-Peter WITKIN et du « cas » David NEBREDA. Pour autant que leur intention ne soit pas forcément la subversion, ils ont au moins en commun de nous jeter au regard ce que cache la peau, ce qu’est la chose qui nous fait sous sa surface visible, cette autre chose que le pur produit d’une matrice. ...

This image is one of over 118,000 from The Art Museum Image Consortium Library (The AMICO Library™), a growing online collection of high-quality, digital art images from 39 museums around the world.

Creator Name: Gottfried Helnwein
Creator Nationality: European; Central European; Austrian
Title: Self-Portrait
Creation Date: 1993
Object Type: Drawings and Watercolors
Materials and Techniques: Colored pencil
Contributor: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Owner Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Credit Line: Museum Purchase, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund ...

Helnweins Thema ist der malträtierte, unterdrückte Mensch, am beeindruckendsten in einer Serie von mißhandelten und verstümmelten Kinderköpfen (1969). Dieses Thema inszeniert er auch in Fotoserien und Installationen sowie Performances ("Blut für Helnwein", 1972). Nach 1985 kombiniert er großformatige Fotos mit abstrakt-gestischer Malerei ("Der Beweis", 1986). In Helnweins Kunstauffassung offenbart sich ein obsessiver Realismus, der die verdrängte, tabuisierte »Nachtseite« der menschlichen Zivilisation in packenden Metaphern veranschaulicht. ...

Austrian born artist Gottfried Helnwein's work is also of exemplary value, beginning with bandage action events (documented by the artist appearing in cafe's and lying in the street with his "wounded" head and face bandaged). His work depicts physical injuries which are metaphors for far deeper existential, psychological and human tragedies. Medical injuries, facial deformities and abused children proliferate throughout his work evoking primary internal anxieties. The inhumane acts of violence (child abuse, war atrocities, state oppression) and frightening images of familial estrangement that are presented in his work, constitute events which are preferred forgotten, like the nazi era, or preferred left unspoken such as familial traumas like child abuse. Helnwein also conducts a probing analysis of the individual and the self through an abundance of self portraits, each obscured by hideous facial bandages, his facial muscles, lips and eyes are stretched apart, torturingly, by varied medical instruments, now made famous by the Rammstein covers. All his images in some way evoke associations with mutilation, anguish or internal alienation. The works (frequently paintings appearing remarkably like photographs), boldly put forward social unacceptabilities never before portrayed so lucidly and so confrontingly. The many intensities produced in the work are profoundly disturbing, the impressions - uncomfortably eerie, electrocuting the eyes with a rush of haunting spatiality. ...

"Dino Buzatti hat einmal geschrieben, die menschlichen Enten des Carl Barks böten für die Weltkunst ein so bedeutendes Figuren Repertoire wie die von Moliere, Goldoni, Balzac oder Dickens.
Und für Gottfried Helnwein, der eine Ausstellung über Donald und seine Welt zusammengestellt hat, ist Barks der einzige bedeutende Künstler unseres Jahrhunderts neben Picasso.
Aber der ästhetische und soziale Reichtum, den Donald Duck Leserinnen und Leser in aller Welt schätzen und lieben [...] all das macht Donald zum Zentrum einer universalen, dynamischen Kunst-Welt. Aber in Deutschland ist er mehr; in der Bundesrepublik und in Österreich gibt es nur wenige Biographien, in denen er nicht eine fundamentale Bedeutung hat, eine Überlebensbedeutung, eine Fluchtbedeutung, eine Wahrheitsbedeutung. ...

In art we can experience Holocaust at the Imperial War museum, Apocalypse in RCA, and we can just view Euguene Smith's photographs and Helnwein's amazing art within stupefaction, or we can even find ourselves attached with Tarantino's 'ironic, affectless and funny' violent images...
On one hand, the perception and cognition of reality within these images of death, dying and suffering are bound to change one's attitude, ethical and moral views, and opinions in a way where the familiarity to death is dissipated and has become submissive. It has become easier to face the idea of death. So one might argue the fact that desensitized impression is actually sensitizing. On the other hand, the artist, who chooses to exhibit and present the political and provocative images of pain as a means of catharsis in order to heal, might be bringing a new way of dealing with the issues of death, suffering and dying (as in Helnwein's case).
So the project aims to scrutinize the fine line between these two views while investigating the contemporary images of death within a sociological, philosophical and historical approach. ...

Nicht nur um die Spannbreite des künstlerischen Darstellungsmodus, der sowohl reduktiv wie expressive ist, zu demonstrieren, sondern auch, um die Gattung der Portraits zu ergänzen, sei kurz auf die "Selbstportraits" verwiesen. Die Akribie der Fotografien und "silver" prints, die Präzision der Zeichnungen und die Radikalität der Farbmalerei, die die eigene Gestalt zum Schimmer ihrer Selbst werden läßt, indem Form und Kontur fast bis zur Gänze aufgelößt ist, verdeutlichen Schmerz, Angst, Leid und Ohnmacht. Auch das so oft anzutreffende Portrait von Gottfried Helnwein, welches ihn durch das an sein Gesicht angepaßte, ärztliche Instrumentarium, zur Grauen erregenden Maske mutieren läßt, ist Schrecken der eigenen Erscheinung. Erblindung, Schrei und Fessel stoßen ab, indem die tiefsten psychischen Abgründe anschaulich inszeniert und allegorisiert werden. ...

La démarche de Gottfried Helnwein est différente. C’est l’enfant victime qui est son sujet. Victime, mais également sauveur, comme dans l’une de ses plus belles œuvres, “Kindskopf”, exposée dans l’eglise médiévale de Krems en Autriche, en 1991. ...