Art Direction: Gottfried Helnwein
Editing and primary director of photography:
Benjamin at the Barbarian Group
Second camera: Charles Koutris
Location: studio Helnwein, Los Angeles ...

Mag in der Insistenz und Extensität der Produktion Rainers Werk herausragen, die Abwendung von der Anthropologie, die als Negation doch auch mit ihr verknüpft ist, durchzieht die Kunst seit der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zum Bestand der kanonisierten Kunst gehören mittlerweile die fotografisch dokumentierten Body-Perfomances der 60er und 70er Jahre (z.B. Bruce Naumann, Jürgen Klauke, Klaus Rinke), die Selbstporträts Gottfried Helnweins der 70er und 80er Jahre, die Video-Dummies von Tony Oursler. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

These paintings are about America, I guess from a very European point of view.
They're based on photographs, mainly newspaper photographs, of the Fifties and Sixties from archives in New York and L.A. Most people in these pictures are real people, caught in some long forgotten, petty events.
I rearranged the scenes, introduced new characters, and created new relationships and contexts. And then I painted them in black and blue.
That's how I remember America back then in the early Fifties in Vienna, where I was born. The big war had ended a few years ago, but the city still seemed undecided as to whether this was the end of the world or if life should go on.
It was a strange, sad and surreal world. The streets were empty, the houses dark - many of them in ruins from the bombings.
The few people I saw seemed ugly, clumsy, and depressed.
I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard anybody sing. It was a world without sound and colour. Everything moved in slow motion, like slime. We had no phones, no television, no cars, no music, no pictures, except the paintings of tortured people in the Roman Catholic church which made a deep impression on me, haunting me in the sleepless nights of my childhood limbo.
And then, without any warning, suddenly there was America.
When I saw the first picture of Elvis I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.
That was the beginning of the never-ending flood of American images that suddenly came over us and started to penetrate and transform everything. ...

Gottfried Helnwein, der Künstler als Agressor und vermaledeiter Moralist, S. 10-19, in: Helnwein, Arbeiten von 1970-1985, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Wien, 3.4.-5.5.1985, Wien 1985. ...

Project Arts Centre ...

The Choice, is an exhibition that identified unknown and emerging artists through the viewpoint of leading contemporary artists. We invited an international group of artists to engage their own curatorial ideas. In the role of curator, these artists had been asked to present the work of artists they have followed or whose work has affected them in a personal way.
Curator/Artists
Ida Applebroog: Jane Higgins, Saeri Kiritani, Lisa Petsu Lagunes
Nicole Eisenman: Alison Kelly, Maria E. Piñeres, Suzanne Wright
Robert Gober: Jonathon Hexner
Antony Gormley: Ignassi Aballi, John Patrick Clayman
Gottfried Helnwein: Iris Andraschek, Danielle Kraay
Damien Hirst: Rachel Howard
Ronald Jones: Eric Schnell
Frank Moore: Aaron Cobbett, Michael Combs
Cindy Sherman: Charles Clough, Susan Jennings, David Krueger, Gail Le Boff
Laurie Simmons: Helen Rousakis, Pedro Barbeito
Kiki Smith: Joey Kötting
Sam Taylor-Wood: Georgie Hopton
Nari Ward: Brett Cook Dizney, Chris Sollars ...

Gottfried Helnwein's artistic and intellectual approach is to aim quite subtly at producing a crucial feeling of insecurity and a concomitant change of consciousness in the viewer, by using seemingly familiar or usual images that have a certain amount of tradition and an apparently well known composition. ...