“Look Now” was a spectacular show comprised of photography, installations, painting and video art. The images were often disturbing as the examples of Gottfried Helnwein’s haunting painting of a child in military dress and Tony Oursler’s disembodied, frog-like talking heads, which amused, admonished and interrogated their audience went fully to show. The exhibit attempted to “confront us with the realities that lie behind and between our fantasies of who we are and of the world in which we live,” and this was certainly chillingly and mesmerizingly achieved. ...

Contemporary Looks "Radar: Selections From the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan" will be the principal opening exhibition. Among, the works on view will be Thomas Schutte's "Grosse Geister," (left), Franz Ackermann's "B 1 (Barbeque with the Duke)" (center) and Gottfried Helnwein's "Epiphany" (right). ...

Provokateure in der Kunst gibt es schon eine Weile. Besonders in Österreich tritt diese Spezies seit den 60er Jahren hervor. Man denke nur an Hermann Nitsch, Arnulf Rainer oder Günter Brus. Gottfried Helnwein (geb. 1948), etwas jünger, hat sich ebenfalls als Enfant terrible etabliert. Gesicht und Hände mit Rasierklingen bearbeitend, von Wien nach Venedig pilgernd, ohne zu essen und zu schlafen, oder sich selbst porträtierend als "Schreiender - Geblendeter." Jetzt kann man in der Galerie Brockstedt überprüfen, wie sich der Künstler zwischenzeitlich entwickelt hat. ...

The child as a symbol of hope, purity and innocence triggers a protective reflex that taps into society's instinct to cherish and protect its young. Any tarnishing of this ideal is naturally going to provoke controversy, with art, literature and advertising strewn with instances of iconoclasts who have upset the moral applecart. (Henry James' novel The Turn of the Screw, the sinister paintings of Balthus, or the candid photographs by Sally Mann, are all examples.) It is within such company that Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein rests, as his controversial works cause people to sit up and take notice whenever he exhibits. Certainly, shocking images of deformed babies, Nazi ephemera and pseudo-religious overtones are not for the faint-hearted. However, the majority of the portrait paintings on show in the current exhibition at the Fenton are perhaps more palatable for the general viewer, as the imagery is comparatively sedate in terms of narrative and symbolism. ...

WITH his bandanna and long dark hair, wearing something that looks like a flak jacket, swarthy Gottfried Helnwein could be a guerrilla or a pirate-revolutionary.
But the rock 'n' roll lifestyle and 17th-Century castle in Co Tipperary adorned with huge canvases tell a different story. He's an artist of serious international reputation, veteran of many controversies, who counts Sean Penn, Marilyn Manson, Norman Mailer and, once, Marlene Dietrich among his friends. ...

Die Welt des Walt Disney hat moderne Künstler seit der Pop Art inspiriert. Christian Boltanski widmet sich 1972 den Fotos von Mitgliedern des Mickey-Clubs des Jahres 1955 und Gottfried Helnwein portraitiert 2000 den "American Prayer", einen Jungen, der sein Abendgebet Donald Duck widmet. ...

Andy invited me to the factory in New York 1983 and after the usual compliments how he loved my work and so on, he asked me to follow him into an empty room where we sat down opposite to each other and he just froze and he didn't say anything and he didn't move. We sat in silence for some time and I didn't know what to do - at first it was strange and it felt kind of awkward, but then slowly everything started to transcend and the tension dissipated and nothing seemed important anymore. Andy looked like a wax-dummy in the posture of a pharaoh that had been dead since thousands of years - the room around us became darker and darker and the white of Andy's face and hair got a glow so intense that it started to burn my eyes. I realized that we were floating now somewhere in outer space and nothing mattered anymore and I raised my Nikon and shot.
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Con la Statua della Libertà, il grattacielo e la bottiglia della Coca-Cola, Nighthawks di Edward Hopper è uno dei grandi simboli dell'America. Una simile popolarità è toccata a pochi altri quadri - alla Gioconda, alla stanza di Van Gogh, all’urlo di Munch. Come la Gioconda, Nighthwaks è citato dappertutto: film (Blade Runner in testa), romanzi, quadri. L'ultima citazione, o magari già la penultima, in Radio America, il nuovo bellissimo film di Altman. Ne esiste pure un’imitazione, forse non meno famosa, dell’artista austriaco Gottfried Helnwein, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, dove i quattro anonimi personaggi dell’originale sono sostituiti da Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean ed Elvis Presley. ...

“Face it”, Gottfried Helnweins erste Museumsausstellung in Österreich seit mehr als 20 Jahren, verzeichnete grosses Interesse beim Publikum. Mehr als 38.000 Leute besuchten in den vergangenen drei Monaten das Linzer Lentos, und begutachteten die aktuellen Arbeiten des in Amerika und Irland lebenden “ Schockkünstlers”. “Face it” war damit die bisher meist besuchte Schau eines zeitgenössischen Künstlers im Lentos. ...

38.000 Besucher lockte die am Pfingstmontag zu Ende gegangene Ausstellung von Gottfried Helnwein in drei Monaten ins Lentos. „Face It“, so deren Titel, ist damit die meistbesuchte Schau eines zeitgenössischen Künstlers im Linzer Kunstmuseum. Mit 11.000 Besuchern allein im März machte sie diesen Monat zum drittstärksten seit der Lentos-Eröffnung. Nicht alle Leihgaben treten übrigens den Rückweg nach Los Angeles bzw. Irland an, wo der Wiener Künstler lebt: Drei großformatige Arbeiten hat das Haus für seine Sammlung angekauft, die damit nunmehr fünf „Helnweins“ besitzt. „Face It“ war nach 20 Jahren die erste umfassende Werkschau des Malers in seinem Heimatland.
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