Helnwein and his work in Ireland
SF680
1997 and had his first major exhibition at The Kilkenny Arts Festival
2001, with a one man show at the Butler House, and an installation in
the Kilkenny city center
http://www.helnwein.com/news/update/artikel_301.html
THE KILKENNY ARTS FESTIVAL CATALOGUE
The Kilkenny Arts Festival 2001
Curator: Claire O'Donoghue
GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN
Exhibition - catalogue
One man show, Butler House, Kilkenny
Installation in the Kilkenny city center
Introduction by Claire O'Donoghue
Essay by Mic Moroney
http://www.helnwein.com/news/update/artikel_444.html
Helnwein in his studio in Ireland:
http://www.helnwein.com/kuenstler/atelier/tafel_1.html
The following articles are from the Irish press that came out
concerning the Helnwein installation at the time:
05.Aug.2001
THE SUNDAY TIMES, Ireland
THE SUNDAY TIMES, culture, cover story
Medb Ruane
SHOCK ART
The disturbing Work of Helnwein comes to Ireland Helnwein is a
headline artist who works in tight sound bites on a very large scale.
The works brand themselves with proof of his technical know-how in
various media and are endorsed by the coolest celebrities of his
generation. So much for the cover-story, so what lies within?
Headlines lure you into stories that make you want to cry, smile or
help to change the world. But when they stop at your own skin, you can
get a sinking feeling, a sense of the bigness and badness outside and
the impossibility of change.
http://www.helnwein.com/news/update/artikel_67.html
The Irish Times | 01.Aug.2001
CUTTING EDGE
Aiden Dunne
While it is a painting, Epiphany is typical in its almost
interchangeable use of photography and painting: both played their
part in the achievement of the eventual, quasi-photographic image. He
is a fine photographer, and his photographic portraits of Kilkenny
children (enlarged to an enormous scale) form one strand of his
festival exhibitions. The careful adaptation of existing imagery is
another trait, and his references extend back through fine art history
as well as history itself...
http://www.helnwein.net/article68.html
01.Aug.2001
Helnwein catalogue for the Kilkenny Arts Festival 2001
Mic Moroney
THE MURMUR OF THE INNOCENTS
As I write, the Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein is wrestling
excitedly with his first exhibition in the country which he recently
made his home. The work spills out of Butler House, and up onto the
festival streets of Kilkenny. These images are huge - in one case as
big as six by nine metres, hoisted onto the facade of Kilkenny Castle.
. .
To read the rest: http://www.helnwein.com/texte/international_texts/artikel_78.html
Text by: Mic Moroney
From the catalogue "Helnwein" for the Kilkenny Arts Festival 2001,
Installation at Kilkenny Castle and in the city centre of Kilkenny and
a One-Man show at the Butler House, August 10th - August 19th, 2001
Gottfried Helnwein, AT THE KILKENNY ART FESTIVAL, 2001
01.Aug.2001 Helnwein catalogue for the Kilkenny Arts Festival 2001
20.Aug.2001
The Irish Times, Aiden Dunne
THIS YEAR'S KILKENNY ARTS FESTIVAL HELPED TAKE CHALLENGING WORK OUT OF
THE GALLERY AND ONTO THE STREETS.
The point of the images is that they put it up to you as a viewer.
Given that, one potential line of criticism is that they are designed
solely to be provocative, like Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra
Hindley. But the abiding strength of Helnwein's work is that
provocation is a means rather than an end; it is - however
uncomfortable - morally grounded, if not necessarily in a way that
will please all observers.
. . .The visual-arts strand of the Kilkenny Arts Festival had played
its part in the trend in recent years. Sadly in this regard, the
complimentary Sculpture At Kells didn't happen this year, apparently
because of the foot-and-mouth crisis.
But in Kilkenny itself, Gottfried Helnwein, the Tipperary-resident
Austrian artist, has taken to the streets in a big way. His
photorealist images are much happier dispersed around the town and in
the castle courtyard than they are penned up in Butler House, where
their upfront directness and aspirations to cinematic scale sit a
little uneasily.
Helnwein is famously confrontational, and his bold conflations of Nazi
and Christian iconography, in Epiphany and other prominently displayed
pictures, predictably generated some friction. Yet, in a way, one
shouldn't rush to condemn condemnations of, or expressions or
resignation about, Helnwein's work, no matter how superficial or
uninformed they turn out to be. Because, let's face it, a large part
of its effectiveness had to do with its calculated, barbed ambiguity.
. .
http://www.helnwein.com/presse/international_press/artikel_64.html
Text by: Aiden Dunne
Gottfried Helnwein, AT THE KILKENNY ART FESTIVAL, 2001
20.Aug.2001 The Irish Times
Irish Indipendent (news) | 01.Aug.2001
THOUSANDS EXPECTED TO ATTEND ARTS FESTIVAL
RECORD numbers are expected to visit Kilkenny's art festival over the
next week.
Organisers say attendance at shows and exhibitions on the first
weekend indicates that up to 80,000 people will have visited by the
time the 10-day event finishes next Sunday.
The main talking point of the festival is a series of paintings
including one by world-renowned Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein,
who took an old photograph of Adolf Hitler surrounded by children and
replaced it with the Madonna and Child surrounded by SS officers.
Heinwein's paintings are hanging on a number of buildings around the
city, including Kilkenny Castle, the National Irish Bank and the
Watergate Theatre.
Funding for the festival is the highest to date with the organisers
receiving more than £400,000. . .
http://www.helnwein.net/article368.html
07.Aug.2001, The Irish Times, frontpage
EYE TO EYE WITH THE FACE OF A KILKENNY CHILD
Workmen finish one of a series of prints measuring 9.3 metres by 6.2
metres by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein.The prints of Kilkenny
children will hang on buildings in Kilkenny as parts of its arts
festival beginning on August 10th.
http://www.helnwein.com/presse/international_press/artikel_66.html
18.Aug.2001
The Irish Times
Chris Dooley
South East Correspondent
GARDAÍ INVESTIGATE KILKENNY ART ATTACKS
Gardaí (the Irish police) are investigating attacks on two images by
the controversial Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein, displayed as
part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. . .
http://www.helnwein.com/presse/international_press/artikel_63.html
Text by: Chris Dooley
Gottfried Helnwein, Kilkenny Arts Festival 2001
18.Aug.2001 The Irish Times
Kilkenny People | 27.Jul.2001
A HANGING MATTER?
Sean Keane
A major controversy has erupted over plans to hang huge paintings
outside City Hall during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Examples of the
paintings to be displayed were shown to members of Kilkenny
Corporation on Monday night and it sparked uproar in the chamber.
Cllr Paul Cuddihy rose to his feet and said that the city would be
seen to be promoting the people responsible for the Second World War
and the Holocaust if paintings like the one handed out at the meeting
were allowed to be displayed outside City Hall.
He was referring to a controversial picture by Gottfried Helnwein, the
internationally acclaimed Austrian artist who wants to display his
work in the city during the Arts Festival. Arts Minister, Sile de
Valera had already given the green light to hang some of his latest
pieces from the front of Kilkenny Castle. . .
http://www.helnwein.net/article610.html
The Irish Times | 26.Jul.2001
DISPUTE OVER NAZI IMAGES IS RESOLVED
Chris Dooley
A former mayor of the city, Mr. Paul Cuddihy, objected to a proposal
to display one of the images on the City Hall after it was shown to
members of Kilkenny Corporation on Monday night. After visiting the
artist at his home in Co.Tipperary, however, the Fine Gael councillor
said Mr. Helnwein was an "astonishinlgy good" artist whose works would
have a "huge visual impact" on next month's festival. . .
http://www.helnwein.net/article70.html
12.Aug.2001, The Irish Times
Judith Crosbie
KILKENNY ARTS FESTIVAL NOT WITHOUT ITS SHARE OF CONTROVERSY
The canvases showing images from the Nazi era just left them confused,
but the throngs who visited Kilkenny during the weekend snapped away
with their cameras all the same.
The hot-dog and ice-cream vans parked outside Kilkenny Castle said it
all. The Kilkenny Arts Festival with its schedule of theatre,
classical and Irish music, puppet shows and art exhibitions was open
to everyone, even children.
No better way was this shown than with the giant canvases draped along
the castle and around the streets of the city. For those who didn't
know the work of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, his huge pictures
of local children were a delight. . .
http://www.helnwein.com/presse/international_press/artikel_65.html
Text by: Judith Crosbie
Gottfried Helnwein, AT THE KILKENNY ART FESTIVAL, 2001
12.Aug.2001 The Irish Times
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2002/1011/index.html
01.Aug.2001, Irish Independent
Patricia Deevy
CHILDHOOD DEFILED, STARKLY PORTRAYED
Once an agitated spectator wondered how an apparently nice man could
produce such disturbing imagery. Helnwein replied: "What bothers you
is the pictures that get triggered in your own head." Perusing a
catalogue of his work in preparation for a meeting is a journey
through disgust, fear, fascination and admiration to finally - almost
- attachment.
Patricia Deevy talks to artist Gottfried Helnwein about his grisly
depiction of violence, cruelty and torture
His work may no longer inspire nightmares but, as visitors to the
Kilkenny Arts Festival are finding out, Gottfried Helnwein is still
arresting.
Once an agitated spectator wondered how an apparently nice man could
produce such disturbing imagery. Helnwein replied: "What bothers you
is the pictures that get triggered in your own head." Perusing a
catalogue of his work in preparation for a meeting is a journey
through disgust, fear, fascination and admiration to finally - almost
- attachment.
The common motif is childhood defiled; the common tension, between
innocence and brutality. Controversial early '70s works are
beautifully executed paintings of children maimed or scarred in
sickening or suggestive ways. Current work includes oversized
photo-realist portraits based on a 19th century collection at
Austria's anatomical museum. They are of stillborn babies preserved in
formaldehyde. "You have the feeling of being close to this being who
was there. I think they're beautiful. Each one of them looks
different, peaceful." In these later works strangeness is undercut by
tenderness.
Some of these paintings are exhibited in Butler House on Patrick
Street. Huge head-shots of local children hang on city buildings.
Their eyes are closed, "so you know they have an inner life."
A couple of weeks ago a city councillor, Paul Cuddihy, went to
Helnwein's castle in Tipperary to figure out if he should remain
outraged at another part of the artist's exhibition - a giant
photograph of grinning young Nazis adoring a Madonna and child - to be
displayed on a wall of the city hall. Cuddihy was satisfied by the
artist's anti-Nazi intentions.
It would be ironic if Helnwein was condemned for any kind of
supremacism because his life's work had been an interrogation of
fascism. He was born in a middle-class Viennese family in 1948: father
in the post office, mother at home, three sisters. (Answers to
questions about family background are telegraphically brief).
Like most of their generation, his parents didn't talk of the war. "I
remember my childhood being surrounded by depressed people. I never
heard anybody sing. I never saw anybody laughing. It was really black
and dark. There was no art or culture.
"It was a world without pictures really, except in children's books.
Then you have in Germany fairytales, but they're all very cruel." The
favourite for children was the mid-19th century Struwwelpeter
(Slovenly Peter). These were moral fables where misbehaving children
met graphically grisly fates.
Catholicism held out the same lesson: sin led to a nasty end. Mind
you, so did virtue if you were to believe the lives of the saints.
"The only art I really saw was in church. When you go in a church it
is an orgy of pictures and you have skulls and skeletons all over the
place and dead bishops in glass coffins and the sacred tools for
martyrdom and everything."
The first blow against the martyrs was struck by Donald Duck. Disney
comics suggested another way of seeing. "I saw these colours and these
beautiful drawings and I was really entering a three-dimensional
world. I thought I was stepping out of a black and white silent movie
into the real world." (Huge menacing Mickey Mouses are now a favourite
subject, reflecting his suspicion of the monster capitalist Disney
Inc. has become).
In his mid-teens Helnwein did not know how he could make a future.
Finally he decided on art. "It's the only thing where I don't have
seniors. Where I decide my rules, and still I can do something which
has an impact on society."
At his first art school he got bored and one day cut his palms with a
razor and used the blood to paint a portrait of Hitler. He was
expelled. It was a taste of what was to come: "Aktions" (public
artistic happenings) over the next years would involve more cutting,
blood and bandages. Once he walked the streets dressed as Hitler,
blood spewing from his mouth. It was a way of breaking out of the life
he'd been born into - wrongly, he thought - and rules that meant
nothing to him.
"[I felt] I don't belong here. My parents are nice: I've never really
had a fight. But I don't feel related at all."
At the Academy of Fine Art he was left to work in his own way. His
theme was cruelty to children: "I was always so shocked form childhood
on about the idea that somebody would get mistreated, abused,
tortured. I wasn't mistreated personally but I always thought of
things like that. I just painted it because by painting I got it out
of my head."
Stickers with the abusive words "Entartete Kunst" - a Nazi term
meaning "degenerate art" - appeared on his work in his early
exhibitions. (Meanwhile, ironically-intended portraits of Hitler
attracted fascist admirers - which raises questions about intentions,
meaning and ambiguity in art which are not for here).
Helnwein has researched his subject - violence, cruelty, torture - in
depth. "Knowing and feeling it's there is really unbearable for me. I
always think if you learn and read and talk you might be able to
understand it more."
In 1979 Helnwein's insistence on displaying brutality had a political
effect. In an interview after he was appointed Austria's Head of State
Psychiatry, Dr. Heinrich Gross admitted that during the war he had
poisoned hundreds of handicapped children as a "humane" way of killing
them. Shocked that there was no outcry, Helnwein produced a picture of
a child slumped over a plate with her face fallen into the food and
called it "Life not Worth Living". The debate which ensured led to
Gross's resignation.
Through the decades Helnwein had done everything from drawing to opera
sets, carried out commissions for the covers of magazines such as
Stern and Time (John F. Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev), and made a
book about Berlin with Marlene Dietrich. His work appears in
prestigious collections all over central and eastern Europe and
America, particularly its west coast (celebrities love him). Next year
he will be the fist western artist to exhibit in Beijing's Forbidden
City.
With such a hyperactive international career it's hard to see what
brings him to this quiet spot at the foot of the Comeragh mountains
where he has lived since 1997. He says after 15 years in Germany he
needed a change. "The noise is unbelievable - the real noise and the
metaphoric noise. Everything's about being seen and business."
Four years ago Helnwein came to Ireland for the firs time. "You feel a
sense of joy inside and freedom and relief that I had not had anywhere
else. I thought: 'I was never in my life so happy and I have no idea
why.' This country has so many qualities which I haven't seen anywhere
else that living here is a dream. There's less aggression. Less
jealousy. Here you feel there is no class system really."
Helnwein hardly knows Vienna any more. His mother died some years ago
but his father still lives in the city. They don't see each other
much. He says he doesn't feel related to his sisters but that they're
nice people and interestingly, like him, they really like children and
have big families, though he doesn't know how big.
Helnwein is married to Renate, a former psychiatric nurse from
southern Germany. Together they have Cyril, Mercedes, Ali Elvis (after
two great heroes) and Wolfgang Amadeus (after another). "My life was
too stressed or I would have 10 children. I'd like a big table, 20
children, lots of artists, musicians, philosophers and friends and
have this cultivated talk which is gone today. In that sense I'm very
much Italian inside." (Helnwein is friendly but hardly one's image of
a jolly paterfamilias: dressed in black, he is tall, angular,
yellow-skinned and over a floppy '70s haircut he wears a black
bandanna printed with white skulls.)
The plan is to stay in Ireland "indefinitely". Kilkenny and Tipperary
are under his skin now. Even the contours of the land have waylaid
him. "I certainly get the desire to paint landscapes - which I never
had before."
The Kilkenny Arts Festival runs until next Sunday. Event details from
056 52175 or www.kilkennyarts.ie. Gottfried Helnwein's website is
www.helnwein.com.
http://www.helnwein.com/presse/international_press/artikel_69.html
Text by: Patricia Deevy
Gottfried Helnwein, ONE MAN SHOW IN KILKENNY, 2001
01.Aug.2001 Irish Independent
The following article is about the most recent showing of Helnwein
work, at the Lead White Gallery in Dublin.
01.Sep.2002, Lead White Gallery, Dublin
Mic Moroney
HELNWEIN
Group show
Helnwein's painting - both cheekily and totally in homage -
appropriates the great paintings, "The Polar Sea" (1824) by the
leading German Romantic landscape artist Casper David Friedrich.
Helnwein here re-renders the painting in a gloomy, cinematic
blue-black duochrome, and hugely magnifies it from its original scale
(about 1 metre by 1 metre 30), although the foundered ship still seems
dwarfed and pulverised by the splintering ice sheets. It remains a
fine example of that particularly Germanic celebration of heroic
humanity dashing itself against the majestic cruelty of nature.
Helnwein, in his wry title and borrowing of the image, is suggesting
an uncomfortable paradigm behind Friedrich's painting - a perpetual
sense of momentous revolution within nature, raw humanity and indeed
artistic culture. These ideas pervaded Friedrich's work, as well as
that of composer Richard Wagner and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche -
all of whose works were later so mistakenly absorbed into the
"superhuman" aesthetic of Nazi ideaology and doctrine.
Gottfried Helnwein is an international artist in his early 50s, whose
work is now housed in such prestigious collections as the Smithsonian
Institut in Washington, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Fine Arts
Museum of San Francisco, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg
and the Chinese Museum of Art in Beijing. Personal clients include the
major American collector Kent Logan and the actor Arnold
Schwarzenegger.
Originally from Austria but now resident in County Tipperary, Helnwein
grew up into a claustrophobic, bourgeouis, post-war Viennese society
which, unlike much of Germany, had not been truly deNazified. This
unease with, and yet celebration of German-language cutlure continues
to inform Helnwein's work, not least in this large piece, "The Silent
Glow of the Avant Garde"
Helnwein's painting -- both cheekily and totally in homage --
appropriates the great paintings, "The Polar Sea" (1824) by the
leading German Romantic landscape artist Casper David Friedrich.
Helnwein here re-renders the painting in a gloomy, cinematic
blue-black duochrome, and hugely magnifies it from its original scale
(about 1 metre by 1 metre 30), although the foundered ship still seems
dwarfed and pulverised by the splintering ice sheets. It remains a
fine example of that particularly Germanic celebration of heroic
humanity dashing itself against the majestic cruelty of nature.
Helnwein, in his wry title and borrowing of the image, is suggesting
an uncomfortable paradigm behind Friedrich's painting -- a perpetual
sense of momentous revolution within nature, raw humanity and indeed
artistic culture. These ideas pervaded Friedrich's work, as well as
that of composer Richard Wagner and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche --
all of whose works were later so mistakenly absorbed into the
"superhuman" aesthetic of Nazi ideaology and doctrine.
Gottfried's work has evolved from his early realist, often grotesque
drawings and bandaged "Aktionen" (performances) on the streets of
Vienna to a moody, very contemporary photorealism. He is happy to work
through different media, and has collaborated with a number of theatre
and opera directors on large-scale set-designs in Germany, as well as
rock artists in Germany and the US, where he is currently working with
Marilyn Manson. But Helnwein's work is not without its humour -- as
when he appropriates the image of Mickey Mouse and invests him with
growling menace, or celebrates his lasting appreciation of the saintly
everyman persona of Donald Duck.
Helnwein has also produced paintings specifically for reproduction,
such as his well-known piece in an Austrian news magazine in 1979, of
a child's face slumped, dead, by a food bowl. He produced it to
sharpen the debate in Austria about the then appointment to the Head
of State Psychiatry of the former Nazi psychiatrist, Dr. Heinrich
Gross, who had "humanely" killed retarded children by poisoning their
food. Gross was forced to resign the post, and is still, in his 90s,
fighting off indictments for war crimes.
Helnwein caused a stir at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2001 -- in his
first exhibition in Ireland. This featured both a gallery show of
paintings in the Butler House, and an exhibtiion of huge, printed,
public works. There was initial controversy at his enormous
photomontages on the walls of Kilkenny Castle -- images of a
contemporary Madonna and child, adulated by young, doltish SA
stormstroopers; or in another image, senior SS men. The mother and
infant sat angelically in the position that Hitler occupied in the
original propaganda photographs.
Another strand of the public-art work which Helnwein mounted in
Kilkenny involved photography of local children which Helnwein then
rendered huge -- with their eyes closed, in a moment of meditation
which suggests sleep or even death. Beautiful and yet haunting, there
was something about the freckle-faced uniqueness of the Irish
character in these faces which intensified the various emotions these
faces suggested -- from serenity and timeless wisdom, though pain and
disturbance -- or in one, hung over the entrance to a bank, the
irresistable urge to burst into a fit of giggles.
Like the French artist Christo, who wraps various international
landmarks in canvas (from the Reichstag to his failed attempt to get
Dublin Corporation to allow him to wrap Stephens Green), Helnwein has
repeated this strategy in a number of cities around the world, such as
St. Petersburg and most notably Köln in 1988 to mark the 50th
anniversary of Kistallnacht on November 9th 1938, when the Nazis
finally unleashed their full wrath up on Jewish shops and busnisses
all over Germany and Austria.
Next year, Gottfried will become the first Western artist to exhibit
inside the Forbidden City in Beijing. Once again, the central image
will be a gigantic portrait of a girl-child's face, her eyes closed in
a peaceful, breath-taking slumber.
Gottfried's work is primarily about the positioning of images to
produce emotion and debate -- which frequently addresses the
vulnerability and centrality of children in our lives, and the
unnerving shadow of totalitariansim over contemporary civilisation.
Now that Helnwein splits his time between here and his studio in Los
Angeles, he is working on a series of what he calls his "American
Paintings" -- based on photographic archive images from the Los
Angeles public library -- and a number of Irish landscapes which
emerge from composite photographies and panoramas.
This is the first time Gottfried's work has been exhibited in Dublin.
http://www.helnwein.com/texte/international_texts/artikel_637.html
Text by: Mic Moroney
01.Sep.2002 Lead White Gallery
More on Helnwein installation at the Kilkenny Arts Festival:
http://www.helnwein.org/werke/aktionen/group10/image.html
For a list of general articles on Helnwein and his work, go to:
http://www.helnwein.net/index.html
Or to the official Helnwein website:
http://www.helnwein.com/home/home/home.html