Some might think that Los Angeles - its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane." ...

Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition I Walk Alone is pretty unnerving, and that is his point. Large-scale photo-realistic paintings confront the viewer like a series of film stills forming a bizarre and disturbing sequence of nightmares. Using digital photography and computer-generated images combined with classical painting techniques, many of the images are only black and white, while others use one additional color, such as red, to dramatic and horrifying effect.
The images might be seen as bits of individual stories, or pieced together in a variety of frightful ways, or seen as a generalized narrative of brutality and terror, in which innocence is perhaps relative. We are all implicated in Helnwein’s unfolding dramas. ...

"Finally we are living now in a society that is a combination of what Huxley foresaw in his "Brave new World" and Orwell in his "1984". We are caught in a stream of constant propaganda and we are under total surveillance. This is the Age of materialism, consumerism and decadence. Our heroes are idiots like trash-princess Paris Hilton, in their sad 15 minutes of fame. Children are shooting other children in schools before they kill themselves and in other parts of the world they blow themselves up in the middle of crowds.
Doesn't that look like the end of a civilization, the second fall of Rome?" ...

The city's essence feeds his dark, uneasy work, which tends toward violence and the grotesque: bandaged, broken children, scenes of torture, pooling blood, grimacing visages. What he creates, regardless of the medium — watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture — is a psychological excursion into the sublimated self, the obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are unflinching and surgical. ...

Francis (Owen Wilson), der Älteste, trägt nach einem offenbar von ihm selbst verschuldeten Motorradunfall einen so fürchterlichen Kopfverband, wie ihn sonst nur der österreichische Hyperrealist Helnwein zu Leinwand bringen kann. ...

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Today, the body you were born with is no longer a “fixed” entity. In our appearance-obsessed society, people can change the physical contours of their bodies in a myriad of ways. Now, a bold new exhibition at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will explore the modern human form as it is imagined – by contemporary artists.
Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection is drawn from one of the most prominent private collections of international contemporary art in the United States. Many of the artists whose works Vicki (Vassar class of 1968) and Kent Logan have collected are known for depictions of the human form that explore issues of psychological identity, and that reinvent figuration as a conceptual tool. ...

Un iperrealismo perturbante e sconvolgente è la marca di Gottfried Helnwein, pittore, fotografo e performer austriaco che mi era sconosciuto fino a ieri e che ho scoperto attraverso Stumble. Non sapevo neanche che fosse lui l’uomo che sta dietro a “The Golden Age of Grotesque”, progetto multimediale di Marilyn Manson e, a dire il vero, a prima vista, i suoi acquerelli li avevo scambiati per fotografie. ...

Two generations of art provocateurs discuss tortured saints, world wars, and the unbearable lightness of being normal. ...

MARILYN Manson's unheated Californian pile features mounted baboon heads; a lithograph, Epiphany 1 (Adoration of the Magi) by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, depicting the baptism of a Nazi Christ (Helnwein also shot the cover of Manson's fifth album, The Golden Age of Grotesque); and a Joachim Luetke sculpture Homunculus (a baby with chicken feet for hands and the lower body of a caterpillar). On a table, the anonymous aborted fetus in formaldehyde given to him as "a beautiful morbid gift" by his ex-wife, burlesque diva Dita von Teese. ...

EDWARD HOPPER is too easily taken for granted: taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light, capable of converting a New England manse into a Fortress of Solitude; voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary; auteur of the diner reverie "Nighthawks," which not long ago was probably better known via Gottfried Helnwein's travesty "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." ...