"You can't show anyone anything he hasn't seen already, on some level - any more than you can tell anyone anything he doesn't already know. It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.
Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition."

"Helnwein is one of the few exciting painters we have today."

"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 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.
When you find someone in the arts, whether it's in your medium or in another medium, that raises the bar for you, that reinvigorates your own pursuit of affecting people and out of a sharing what you count on as some kind of a common chord in us. Whether it's through imagery, words or sounds.
As an artist my strongest reaction to Helnwein's work is that it challenges me to be better at what I do. There are very few people that achieve utter excellence in what they do.
And I think that Gottfried Helnwein is certainly one of those people."

"Wie hält ein freundlicher Mensch wie Helnwein es aus, seine exzellente - Malerei zum Spiegel der Schrecken des Jahrhunderts zu machen? Oder hält er es einfach nicht aus, das nicht zu tun? Reflektiert sein Spiegel nur die Jahrhunderthaltung, LIEBER EIN SCHRECKEN OHNE ENDE ALS EIN ENDE MIT SCHRECKEN, die aus der Überbewertung des Todes kommt, Folge seiner Tabuierung durch Statistik.
Perseus, der die Gorgo im Spiegel guillotiniert, und wenn der Kopf fällt, ist es der eigene. Wieviel Köpfe hat ein Mensch / Mann in unserem Zeitalter der Spiegel? "

"The paintings and pastels by Gottfried Helnwein appear to be photorealist. But unlike his sharp-focus colleagues, Helnwein's paintings carry powerful covert messages. He is a politically committed artist ... and in his case, you get more than what you see.
His work, in a multiplicity of media, manifests Nietzsche's assertion that "Authenticity of the creative artist can supply meaning to the despair and absurdity of existence."

"For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead creates the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within."

"For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses.
Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public.
Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society."

"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, his art is successful less for its evident tendency to provoke than for its extraordinary ability to perplex.
My art is not giving answers," Helnwein has said. "It is asking questions." In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own."

"I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling of Gottfried Helnwein's "Kindskopf" (Head of a Child) in the Russian Museum.
And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions, seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental space of the museum's exhibition-hall, - I realised that I was looking at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new point of view. "

"Ist es purer Zufall, daß er Warhol als erschreckendes Schattengespenst fotografisch fixiert und Beuys gemalt hat? Darüber hinaus das gemalte Portrait von Beuys wieder fotografiert hat, in den Händen von Arno Breker, Adolf Hitlers liebstem Bildhauer?
Es sprechen gewichtige Gründe dafür, daß Helnwein der legitime Erbe von Beuys und Warhol ist. "