Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibit titled The Child at San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor testifies that the past cannot be erased from the minds of those who had lived through it, not even from the consciousness of those yet to be born: Helnwein was born three years after the death of Hitler, and yet his watercolor painting depicting the "Fuhrer" with two little girls in white dresses communicates not only sarcasm but horror and revulsion. For Hitler is not the painting’s main subject but rather these girls that have already undergone a dehumanizing initiation, these children whose gaze makes their parents shrink.
What you will see in the halls of the Legion of Honor will make you shudder.
Undoubtedly, Helnwein anticipates that reaction, and, yes, he deliberately makes you go through this ordeal, but just as undoubtedly (and therein lies his strength) Gottfried Helnwein puts himself through the same ordeal.

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Первое, что спросил у меня Готфрид Хельнвейн когда мы познакомились – о моём детстве. Было ли у меня счастливое детство? То есть буквально этими словами хотя и по-английски.
Тот пласт русского языка, в котором живёт моё поколение, отзывается на подобный вопрос мгновенно: “Спасибо товарищу Сталину за наше счастливое детство!” ...

Im Mittelpunkt stehen 100 großformatige Fotografien von Robert Mapplethorpe, Gottfried Helnwein, Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga, Marcia Resnick und anderen.
Die Beat Generation - Sie zogen gegen die bürgerliche Gesellschaft und deren Konventionen zu Felde. Anarchie, Provokation und Rebellion waren ihre Themen. Zunächst betrachteten sich die Schriftsteller der Beat Generation, deren Sprache und Stil sich an den Improvisationen des Jazz orientierte, lediglich als Vorhut einer literarischen Strömung. Doch schon bald verkörperten sie mit ihrer radikalen Subversivität, ihrem ausschweifenden Lebensstil, ihren Drogenexperimenten und ihrer Lust am Reisen ein ganz neues Lebensgefühl. ...

The recent landscape show by Gottfried Helnwein at the Crawford Gallery in Cork contained a homage to Friedrich’s The Wreck of the Hope, while the current Walker & Walker exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy features a three-dimensional recreation of his work Wanderer in the Mist. Because it is a show culled from the extensive collection of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, A German Dream does not include these two key works, both of which are in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, but the six works that are included still offer a tantalising taster. They point the way to understanding Friedrich’s iconic idealism and energy, but what they highlight even more pointedly is the need for a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work. ...

If you fondly recall the Gottfried Helnwein self-portrait used as the cover of a Scorpions album, then you'll likely enjoy the Disney-dropping message of the artist's mixed media work American Prayer, and you'll probably even forgive the misspelling of his name on the nearby title card. After all, what evocation of comic-book history would be complete without a typo or two, and who's got time to read text, anyway, when there are such vibrantly graphic treasures as Michael Ray Charles' painting (Forever Free) Beware and the Reed Anderson/Daniel Davidson video "Macho Shogun" to enjoy looking at? ...

Homsest hakkab kinos “Sõprus” jooksma noore režissööri Anri Rulkovi autoriprogramm, kus linastuvad kaks tema lühifilmi – kolm aastat tagasi esilinastunud sünge ja salapärane “Helmut” ja tänavu valminud psühholoogiline thriller “Hirm”.

Kes su mõjutajad ja kõige suuremad eeskujud on?
Foto-, maali- ja installatsioonikunstnik Gottfried Helnwein. ...

Опубликовано 9 февраля'04
Gottfried Helnwein 'American Prayer', 2000
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Речь идет о том, что сейчас в России фактически происходит нивелирование возрастных позиций: различные возрастные группы по многим вопросам имеют сходное мнение. Например, как рассказала представитель компании Romir Monitoring Евгения Крикина, ценностные установки в отношении власти молодого и зрелого поколений практически сравнялись. Причем это можно расценивать как положительное явление. «Это очень хорошо, ведь, чтобы создать свое собственное мнение, человеку нужно иметь базу для него, — прокомментировала она. Бояться такого явления не стоит. Доверие к близким важно. Например, в начале 90-х постоянно возникали семейные конфликты, а сейчас это прошло: все смотрят одни и те же передачи, ходят в одни и те же магазины, и уровень конфликтов в семьях стал ниже». ...

"The Child," at the Legion of Honor (www.thinker.org), is a less lyrical experience that confronts the way that the world so glibly uses children (in advertising, in war, in religion) to achieve less-than-innocent objectives. Some of Helnwein's paintings are terrifying. Instead of poster-child perfection, we're presented with children with various deformities: wayward eyelids, lumpy defects, hideous extra folds of flesh.
Then there's Helnwein's penchant for contrasting childlike innocence with the horrors of the Third Reich. In one piece, a woman with a naked infant son, in the classic pose of the Madonna, basks in the soft-focus gaze of five men dressed in Nazi uniforms.
Thought-provoking? Very. Disturbing? You bet. Children are our sacred cows. But they grow up. In that way, they are miniature adults. Sometimes art can push us in ways that shake the status quo. ...

Gottfried Helnwein’s first one-man exhibition at a major American museum is long overdue. 35 years in the making, “The Child” is a collection of more than fifty drawings, watercolors, photographs, and paintings (several monumental in size). It’s also a show that shocks, and among the crowds thronging to see it, some patrons will be put off: the day I attended, a few seemed downright uncomfortable, if not hostile, toward the work. This is fine. Art should shock, and provoke, and make us feel queasy sometimes.
“The Child” achieves all three, but also startles us with aching beauty, bedazzles us with painterly skill, and injects a necessary perspective into the culture’s collective conscience. ...

Marilyn Manson: "Gottfried Helnwein whom I collaborated with a lot invited us to get married at one of his castles in either Germany or Ireland," Manson said. "So we thought we would just have the pageantry and the ceremony of a normal wedding, but without the church. Because I don't think that I would really be welcome there." ...