Cette photographie peu connue de Michael est l'oeuvre de l'autrichien Gottfried Helnwein. Elle a été réalisée en 1988 alors que Michael était de passage en Allemagne durant son Bad Tour. Cette photographie a aussi fait partie de l'exposition appelée "Faces" présentée par Helnwein au Stadtmuseum de Munich en 1992.
En plus d'être photographe, Gottfried Helnwein est également un peintre et un sculpteur reconnu pour sa vision très particulière de l'époque nazie et pour ses images sur la souffrance et la douleur chez les enfants qui dérangent profondément l'âme...
Deux oeuvres de cet artiste sont incluses dans le livret qui accompagne l'album History de Michael... ...

Wie wird aus der Mauer Kunst? Man muss sie nur neu aufstellen (in 300 Kilo leichten Einzelteilen), ins rechte Licht setzen (mit Halogenspots vor dunklem Hintergrund) und das historische Drumherum erläutern (in einer eigens angefertigten Zeitung). Ach ja, durch berühmte Künstlerhände sollten die Brocken natürlich auch noch gegangen sein, zum Beispiel durch die von Arman, Armleder, Buren, Castelli, Chillida, Helnwein, Kabakov, Long, Noir und dreißig anderen. So jedenfalls macht es das Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, das rund um den 40. Jahrestag des Mauerbaus in der Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle der Stadt Köln die Sammlung von Mauerfragmenten des französischen Ausstellungsvermittlers Sylvestre Verger zeigt: 1989 - Berliner Mauer. ...

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. ...

Автор: D.Green  
Работа поступила 26/2/2001 и уже получила 274 баллов

Kleines Helnwein está considerada de interés nacional y cultural, obtuvo una mención de honor en el concurso de obras teatrales Atahualpa del Cioppo 1999 y su publicación, además de recibir varias nominaciones para los premios teatrales Trinidad Guevara y ACE (Asociación de Cronistas del Espectáculo), y ser seleccionada para el Festival Internacional de Teatro GREC (Barcelona 2001) ...

Kleines Helnwein escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten se inspira en la estética del artista plástico contemporáneo Gottfried Helnwein.
"Kleines Helnwein"
Autor: Rodrigo Malmsten
Elenco: Belén Blanco, Martín Von Tumpling
Música original y en vivo: Mariano Durand y Marcelo Vignolo.
Coproducción del Teatro General San Martín
En el Callejón de los Deseos -Humahuaca 3759 ...

Su gato siamés trata de robar cámara en la sesión fotográfica: extiende su cuerpo como su dueña, se para donde le indica el fotógrafo, mira al objetivo con sus ojos verdes. O deambula llamando la atención por el luminoso departamento donde computadora, libros y revistas expresan el ordenado desorden de esta actriz de 25 años que obtuvo el premio ACE a la actuación en espectáculo off por su labor en Kleines Helnwein, y una invitación para participar con esa obra en el festival Grec 2001, de Barcelona. ...

Any artist who sites Donald Duck and Jesus Christ as the most important influences in their art must be worth taking a look at.
In the row of pristine gallery fronts in London's Cork street, you cannot miss Gottfried Helnwein's show; it's the one with the gigantic Mickey Mouse staring out at you.
The Robert Sandelson Gallery has given us a stunning show of the infamous, Austrian born artist's recent work. Helnwein is on a mission to find the answers to questions that no-one in Austria would give him; such as why the post-war republic portrayed itself as a victim rather than as one of the first main perpetrators of Nazism. ...

In 'The Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous. Much of the work has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child's world are rent with something untoward. For children, not understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape.
Perhaps nothing in the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein's 'Mickey'. His portrait of Disney's favotite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer. This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed.
Helnwein's Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless.
But Mickey's terrifying demeanor hints of things to come. ...

These are the images of a man consumed by free will. A man with a gift and a craft and a passion to challenge the mediocrity of what has already been established. A man whose opinions embody everything authority does not want you to believe in. His name is Gottfried Helnwein, and he recently discussed his 30+ year career with Tastes Like Chicken's Insane Wayne Chingsang. ...