HELNWEIN

[hest...@hotmail.com]

In my opinion one of the important artists of the previous and current
century is undoubtedly the Austrian-born artist, Gottfried Helnwein.

Robert Flynn Johnson - Curator in Charge, Aachenbach Foundation for
Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco - has written an essay
about him, which I think is an excellent summary of his work.
(To view text with images:
http://www.helnwein.com/texte/selected_authors/artikel_79.html --
these images help tremendously in understanding the text).

HELNWEIN

The art of Gottfried Helnwein cannot be properly considered without
surveying the terrain of modern and contemporary art from which it
developed. To understand Helnwein is not just to see what movements
and artists he embraced and was influenced by, but also what he
rejected. For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission.
His art is the visual equivalent of a contact sport. It not only has
put Helnwein at odds with much of the history of post-war art, but
also has positioned him in the forefront of the highly regarded
confrontationalist movements of contemporary art so active in America
and Europe today.

After World War Two, the tear glands of the world dried up from
over-use. It is this world for which Warhol is spokesman. Lucy R.
Lippard, 1966

It is startling and disturbing to reflect that if one walks through
the galleries of major museums exhibiting art of the fifties, sixties,
seventies, and even into the eighties, there is a virtual dearth of
art whose subject matter involves an emotional response to the human
condition or which comments on the major social issues of the day. For
those major painters and sculptors it is as if the Holocaust, the
Vietnam War, the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movement
did not exist. It is not that one would expect many to choose such
subjects but that virtually none did is noteworthy.

Of course, there were a number of artists who continued the crusade
(which reached its peak in the 1930s) to use art as a weapon of social
activism. Artists like Stanley Spencer, Ben Shahn, and Leon Golub
created provocative work but they were seen as peripheral to the
avant-garde by critics, collectors, and museums alike.

Europe, the scene of so much destruction and displacement during the
century, had a greater number of artists attuned to human values in
their art than America. In France, Picasso continued to utilise his
canvas to mirror his psyche and libido to the world. However, as
passionate as he was, Picasso rarely allowed his art to go beyond his
own life as he did in the earlier monumental paintings Guernica (1937)
and The Charnel House (1945). The Swiss-born Alberto Giacommetti
created stark and unnerving images of man in his sculptures and
paintings. Jean Dubuffet drew as much inspiration from the art of the
insane as real life in his contorted comic personages. Germany and
Austria in this period, however, were marked by suppression, not
expression in their art. Mannerists such as Paul Wunderlich and Ernst
Fuchs were in vogue but only the seemingly random photorealism of
Gerhard Richter and Franz Gertsch and the tormented expressionism of
Anselm Kiefer and Horst Janssen struck a truthful note.

One oasis of creativity, during this period, where deeply expressed
ideas about the nature of man existed was London. Francis Bacon and
Lucian Freud were at the forefront of a group of artists that
eventually included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews,
Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, David Hockney, and the expatriate
American R.B. Kitaj.

In America, several popular artists made the odd detour into this area
of expression. Examples would be James Rosenquist's painting "F-111"
(1969), Claus Oldenberg's sculpture, "Lipstick (Ascending) On
Caterpillar Tracks" (1969) and Roy Lichtenstien's romance comic
paintings such as "Drowning Girl" (1963) which contain more parody
than pathos. The two American artists who most often utilized the
headlines of the day were Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.
Concerning Rauschenberg, the potentially volatile use of photographic
images such as President Kennedy and NASA rockets was defused by their
use for purely aesthetic purposes. There is a skillful seductive look
but no discernible message beneath the virtuoso surface except that
raw media can become high art.

Andy Warhol's images strike a deeper chord. Warhol realised that for
his generation (and generations to come?) the purpose of art was to
replace the symbols of an earlier devout and unchallenging age
(Christ, The Virgin Mary, kings, queens, and political leaders) with
the practical and popular replacements of a shallower era (Brando,
Monroe, and other celebrities). Warhol's genius lay in his making a
physical reality out of a phenomenon that was already uneasily
entering our consciousness before his first silkscreen paintings ever
existed; the notion that nothing was sacred or profane anymore.
Anything or anybody could and would become art. Whim was more useful
to Warhol than values. In retrospect, the banality and irony of his
vision made him the most brilliant yet soulless artist of his era.

Grainy newspaper wire photos were the raw material of Warhol's vision.
His subjects included plane and automobile crashes, wanted criminals,
electric chairs, race riots, Jacqueline Kennedy in mourning, and women
who died from consuming tainted tuna fish. The one thing, however,
that is consistent in all these works is that Warhol professed no
feelings one way or the other about the subjects at hand. These
potentially "hot" subjects have been desensitised of their pathos. The
bleached out photo imagery screened onto seemingly random coloured
backgrounds evoke neither approval nor dissent by Warhol. They are
provocative simply by existing as works of art.

An artist who seriously treated portraiture as the focus of his art
was Chuck Close. From the end of the sixties until today, despite
having had to overcome the effects of a stroke, Close has concentrated
on the human face. As astounding as these works are, evolving through
a series of virtuoso styles, there is a strangely unmoving quality
about them. Something with the potential to engage the viewer in human
terms ends up conveying the impersonal identification of a drivers'
license photo.

The overly intellectual and formal aspects of most painting and
sculpture from the 1950s until the beginning of the 1980s was not
shared in other areas of culture. One need only mention, for example,
the names of Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus in
photography; Roberto Rosselini, Elia Kazan, and Michaelangelo Antononi
in cinema; Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Pinter in
theatre; and James Baldwin, Gunter Grass, and John Updike in
literature who embraced and made the turmoil of human existence a
focal point of their art.

Something was brewing amongst visual artists that began in the
sixties, took hold during the 1970s, and only became a vital aspect of
the avant-garde in the 1980s. Theory, design, and decoration were no
longer enough. Artists had to break out of the supplicant to patron
mode.

The artist's feelings became more important than the collector's
appetite. The result carried on by artists of widely diverse styles
contained a pent up angry "nothing to lose" attitude. The past, the
present, the future, sex, death, gender, politics, religion were all
worthy of artistic scrutiny. The desire for individualism and
self-examination in art that flickered to life in the late sixties has
become a full-blown prairie fire of emotionally charged art in the
nineties. The career and the art of Gottfried Helnwein parallels this
course in the history of contemporary art.

I made a promise to myself to remember everything I saw; if someone
should pluck out my eyes, then I would retain the memory of all that I
had seen for as long as I lived. Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird

Artists are the visual, verbal, and audio guardians of our collective
consciousness. For example, few can remember the politics or history
of 18th century Europe, but the music of Mozart and the paintings of
Watteau continue to be a source of inspiration. We might not always
like the message, but it is artists that distil the essence of an era.
They serve as thoughtful messengers to a sometimes unperceptive
present but an often receptive future.

In 1948 Gottfried Helnwein was born in Austria, a country that
willingly had embraced Nazi Germany. For decades after its defeat, the
Austrian population could not come to terms with the evil with which
it had associated. The fervent acceptance of the Anschluss was
replaced by a sense of wounded denial in the years after the war. It
was in this dysfunctional society that Helnwein spent his youth.
Helnwein wrote of this time:

"My childhood was a horror - born right after the war, I lived in a
world of deep depression and unlimited boredom. All the grown-ups
looked ugly and devastated. I never saw anybody laughing and I never
heard anybody sing. I always felt I have landed in limbo. A
two-dimensional world without colours, my real life began when I got
my first Mickey Mouse comic book from the Americans - when I opened a
three-dimensional world full of colours and wonders. My first
encounter with art was totally opposed to the torture art of the
church. Very early I started to research. I knew something had
happened, but all the adults were unable to talk about it. Nobody
wanted to answer my questions. But I found out what I wanted to know
and I'm still finding out."

Gottfried Helnwein is an intelligent individual whose art is
influenced, but not overwhelmed, by his awareness of history, culture,
and politics. As a young man, his artistic energy needed to be
encouraged, channelled, and refined. In 1969, with the support of the
artist Rudolf Hausner, Helnwein was admitted to the Vienna Academy of
Art, the crucible of creativity in Vienna since the days of Gustave
Klimt and Egon Schiele. The four years that Helnwein spent there were
not for instruction, for he required and received little. It was for
the structure and the process. To work within one of the great
ateliers, to interact with fellow artists, and to see art as a vehicle
for expression to a wider audience. Helnwein wrote of this period:
"When I started to paint in the first years, I did not want to know
anything about High Art and the art world. Different than most artists
I knew, for me it was never a matter of decoration, style, or art
reflecting and dealing with the problems of art. It was the politics,
society, history, media, news, that provoked, shocked, and motivated
me and the so called trivial world of comics, advertising and Rock and
Roll. Art, for me, was not only a way to explore the subject matter of
war, violence, and society but also a way to fight back - a way of
resistance - of not agreeing with what an oppressive, manipulating
ruling society is trying to force on us. I felt I could strike back
with my pictures and force people to look at things they'd rather
forget."

It was during this period that Helnwein expanded his creative
imagination into the areas he is best known for today. The art of
drawing and painting was and is the bedrock of his art. However,
Helnwein did not want to be confined or categorised and felt free also
to involve himself in photography. Further, he wanted to take his art
out into the streets, to confront the world with his images and ideas.
This form of art, now generally referred to as performance art, was
called "Aktions." In America, in the early sixties, it was called
"Happenings," but their true origin goes back to the early days of the
Dada movement in Switzerland, France, and Germany. Each of these
different artistic enthusiasms informed his art. A photograph would
inspire a watercolour. A painting would inspire an Aktion. Helnwein
wrote of this period, "In the beginning I was almost autistic... I
didn't know about Richter, Schwarzkogler, the Wiener Aktionism and all
other works. Much later, in the early eighties, I started to research
and I was amazed to see how many connections and similarities I found
with other artists' works which emerged at approximately the same
time. However, there was no direct inspiration or influence."

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot, which the poet spends his
life patiently trying to untie. Jean Cocteau

A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's
art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject
matter was the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it
included self-portraits, was dominated by the image of the child, but
not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein
instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative
image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child
scarred emotionally from within.

In art history, before the end of the eighteenth century, the child as
an independent subject matter hardly existed. The child usually
appeared symbolically or allegorically as cupid, putti or angel. The
child also appeared as a miniature adult as in the depiction of young
gods, kings or, in Christianity , Jesus. This, however, was to change
with the advent of the Romantic movement in Europe. Around 1800,
artists such as William Blake, Louis Leopold Boilly, and Phillip Otto
Runge (above left) began to have children appear as individuals in
their works, disconnected from their previous symbolic baggage. The
image of this now liberated child was one that promised innocence,
freedom, and curiosity. However, now made mortal, there was also the
necessary introduction of emotions, sexuality, and the prospect of
pain, suffering, and death.

There are a number of these earlier artists who were especially
meaningful to Helnwein in their portrayal of children. Among them were
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) with his adoration of feminine
adolescence (above left); Edvard Munch and his depiction of suffering
and sexual awakening (left); and Balthus (below left) with his
preoccupation with secrets and the erotic.

The children in these works have a knowing look in their eyes. There
was a sense of life experienced, both good and bad, which made these
works so intense and in their own day, so controversial. It was
apparent from the reception that these artists and others received,
however, that any derivation from the most bland representation of
children as innocents was cause for violent backlash from society. The
public was then, as it is now, very uncomfortable about showing the
child as having a sexual identity, however subtle, or as suffering in
any way whether physically or emotionally. Artists like Munch were
willing to risk the wrath of propriety in seeking out this un-explored
area of human experience. For Gottfried Helnwein, it became the major
theme of his career.

How can a friendly person like Helnwein stand making
his-excellent-painting into a mirror of the terrors of this century?
Or is it that he can't stand not doing it? Does his mirror just
reflect the attitude of the century? Heiner Müller

Looming out across a Helnwein canvas over twelve feet in length,
Mickey Mouse, 1995, stares back at us. He is, at once, both benignly
sweet and threateningly sinister depending on your age and viewpoint.
Helnwein has written, "what do I associate with the name Disney? The
inspiring sacred comics of my childhood, that gave me a chance to
escape from the cold Nazi-country into a world of joy and wonder, or
Michael Eisner's multi-billion dollar machine that smothers the
world." 8 The truth is, this image could represent both viewpoints,
just one, or neither. As Pablo Picasso once remarked, " a picture
lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on
us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture
lives only through the man who is looking at it."

A flag painting by Jasper Johns is neither pattern nor patriotic. It
is both a beautiful act of pure painting but also an image pregnant
with meaning because of the symbolic nature of the subject matter.
This is also true with Helnwein's painting. Often overlooked in the
discourse over the subject matter or meaning of Helnwein's art is the
appreciation of the compositional and painterly beauty of his work.
The technical virtuosity of his art makes acceptable certain images
that more crudely executed by others would be unbearable. "Mickey
Mouse" hovers between carefree and carnivorous in our consciousness.
It is the unease of our age that Helnwein has seized upon.

"Sunday's Child" (1972), is a disturbing tour de force of the young
Helnwein. It is a multi-layered vision convincing in its hyper-realism
(notice the beautifully rendered reflections of the apartment
buildings in the window) at odds with the absurdist fantasy of a
knapsack toting duck with a popsicle. Between these two competing
tendencies appears an adolescent girl, the true subject of the
picture. She stands in winter coat and mittens in front of the glass
doors of a store festooned with the advertisements of mass
consumerism.

On her arm is a cloth armband signifying that she is blind although it
is clear that she is not. In her hand is a large chocolate bar. Blood
runs down her legs, staining her tights. Is she bleeding from early
menstruation or the result of a sexual encounter (rape?) of which the
chocolate is her reward or to buy her silence? Her face is a
contradiction. She sticks her tongue out to the viewer with a smirk.
Is it an innocent expression or a lascivious gesture?

Helnwein makes our mind swoon between the simply bizarre and the truly
perverse. What holds this outrageous work together is the painstaking
detail of his watercolour rendering and the baffling mystery of what
it represents. Like many of Helnwein's best works, it is a drama
without narrative. Despite all its visual information, it only raises
questions, not answers them.

Tennessee Williams once said that all good art was an indiscretion. In
Helnwein's case, it is a confrontation. Since his earliest work,
Helnwein has linked children and pain. The wounded child has become
his metaphor for the chaos of our emotionally vacant world.

The writer Peter Gorsen wrote of Helnwein's work, "The child is the
embodiment of the innocent, defenceless, sacrificed individual at the
mercy of brute force. As an innocent, child of light, whose head and
hand injuries emit light rays like self-radiating stigmata, he is
heroized into a sufferer and a saviour figure." The wounds of Christ
and the martyrdom of saints so often depicted in countless paintings,
sculptures, and car dashboard shrines no longer have the power to
shock. Despite our general indifference to general suffering in the
world, the thought or better yet, the image of a child in pain still
gets through the emotional defence mechanisms to our feelings.
Helnwein understands this and exploits this knowledge in his art.

"Beautiful Victim I", 1974 was inspired by a 1972 altered photograph
"Child of Light II", which was carefully arranged and posed by the
artist. The magic of this watercolour lies in its balancing of beauty
and horror. The work itself is subtle in colour with exquisite
Vermeer-like light bathing the exquisitely rendered outstretched body
of the young girl. Contradicting the peace is the shocking bandages
and tubes that surround and obscure the child's face. We are repelled
and entranced at the same time. There is no explanation for her
wounds, no explanation for what she is doing on the floor. Helnwein's
aim is not to tell a story but to trigger a response.

Helnwein has always been interested in photography as both a catalyst
in his painting and an end in itself. He has written, "I think
photography is the key medium for all artists who work in some kind of
realistic manner. People today perceive and know the world mainly
through two-dimensional reproductions and film. It's a highly
manipulative media and I'm fascinated by its almost unlimited
possibilities to shift and twist the reality. When it looks like a
photograph people think it's real. So I always had the feeling a very
photographical image has more impact, more suggestive power."

Just as Helnwein creates paintings that appear photographic, in
"Phoney Death", circa 1990, he has created a photograph that takes on
the composition and scale of one of his paintings. The subject is both
autobiographical and symbolic. Helnwein uses the comic book as a
symbol of freedom. As a child he sought refuge in the escapist fantasy
these comics delivered. Here this refuge, although in the possession
of the child, is denied. Because of her bandages, her hands cannot
turn the pages and her eyes cannot see. The starkness of the child's
white world is in contrast to the inviting colour and energy that the
comic book promises.

Helnwein has increasingly preferred to paint in grisaile (monochrome)
utilising a deep blue-black. (Another contemporary artist who employs
this method is Mark Tansey who usually opts for a brick red tonality
in his works.) For Helnwein, the restriction of colour to a single
tone removes extraneous visual distractions and focuses attention on
the subject at hand. It also links his paintings with photographic
sources in an interesting way. A black and white photograph is both
extremely real in its technical ability to capture a moment in time
and, at the same time, completely false in that we do not live in a
world purged of colour. In his monochrome paintings, Helnwein has
taken advantage of our mind's photographic experience and expectations
to create paintings that have that same degree of reality/falsehood.
"Night V (Phoney Death)", 1990 is a chilling revisiting of the wounded
child whose bandages cut her off from the world. In this case,
however, the bandages might be a blessing. The only light in the scene
comes from a glowing television ... a source of information and
enlightenment but also a vehicle of propaganda, commercialisation and
control. On top of the television is a mechanical bank in the shape of
a racially stereotyped black man. Next to it is a sculpture that
vaguely resembles the work that the Nazi's put on the cover of the
violently anti-Semitic Degenerate Art exhibition catalogue in 1937.
Behind the child reclines a beautiful yet unsmiling nude woman of
uncertain ethnic background. The scene resembles nothing so much as a
contemporary updating of the old master imagery of the torment and
temptation of Saint Anthony. The blinded child is surrounded by
symbols of lust, commercialism and prejudice...all vices of an adult
world. The escapist comic book, even with its implied violent subject
matter of "Phoney Death" on its cover is preferable to the alternative
world that awaits this child.

We live in an age of euphemisms to cocoon ourselves from getting too
close to the truth. Bombs that kill civilians do not inflict
casualties but only cause "collateral damage." The greatest cause of
unnatural disaster to humanity over the centuries has not been the
result of economic or nationalistic forces, but by the inhumanity
unleashed by organised religion on one group by another. The use of
brutality under the banner of religion is a profound perversion of
anything sacred. "Untitled" (Madonna and Child), 1994 is Helnwein's
response to the ethnic horrors unleashed in the Balkans since the
dissolution of Yugoslavia. Based on a painting by the Italian
Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Helnwein has
painstakingly replicated the composition in monochrome, except for one
telling detail. In the case of the Christ Child, he has depicted the
face as terribly disfigured and maimed. Helnwein is symbolically
confronting the hypocrisy of Christian Serbs who, while conducting
their reign of terror and murder, under the euphemism of "ethnic
cleansing," maintained that they were defending Christianity against
the inroads of the Moslems. It is history repeating itself and
Helnwein utilises history to comment on the latest failure of
civilisation to be civilised.

Anyone who sees and paints the sky green and pastures blue ought to be
sterilised. Adolf Hitler

This single sentence sums up the essence of the totalitarian mindset.
The world must adhere to an order of which no variation or
independence is acceptable. "Epiphany I", 1996 is from an important
series of three paintings created over a three-year period. This
seamless stapling of a version of the Adoration of the Magi into a
scenario out of the Third Reich is in keeping with Helnwein's desire
to press the limits. Helnwein wrote, "In the Epiphany trilogy, I refer
directly to my (our) own historical background. The most significant
issue on the time track of the occident is Christianity and the male
dominated world of conquering and oppression. The constant slaughter
of the "weak"-women, children, the Jews, and other ethnic minorities,
through holy wars, crusades and the constant extermination of the
inferior."

The apparent blasphemy of this scene of Nazi evil encountering the
Madonna and Child is not so clear cut in Helnwein's mind. It is a more
symbolic case of unconditional evil (the Third Reich) meeting
conditional evil (the Catholic Church). It takes on a further
significance with the knowledge of the complicity of Pope Pius XII, in
matters of moral responsibility, with Germany during World War Two.
The surreal atmosphere within the picture is attributable to Helnwein
creating the veracity of a carefully composed news photo within a
traditional Renaissance composition.

There is a basic misconception that any given face at any given time
looks more or less the same: like a statue's face. Actually, the human
face is as variable from moment to moment as a screen on which images
are reflected ... Gottfried Helnwein's paintings and photographs
attack this misconception showing the variety of faces of which any
face is capable. William S. Burroughs

For Helnwein, the nature of portraiture is not the mere artistic
replication of physiognomy or capturing the essence of a person's
character. It is more complex than that. Helnwein, like many other
artists today such as Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, Christian Boltanski,
Fang Lijun and Ron Mueck have shattered the traditional sense of
identity through formal portraiture and reassembled the concept in a
multitude of different styles and concepts.

In many of Helnwein's works, what at first glance appears to be the
portrait of an individual in truth comes to be seen as a more
generalised conception. This is true in "Untitled", 1996. The
immediate reaction to the work is one of mystery. Is the fragmentary
depiction of the child's face simply caused by shadow or is there no
illusion? Is the face a fragment like some broken Egyptian sculpture
in the British Museum? Is the child depicted asleep as our
subconscious hopes or dead as our subconscious fears? Restricting the
tonalities to a blue-black pallor reinforces a mood of solemnity.
Helnwein gives us enough information to care, but not enough
information to know.

Not content with a consistent artistic viewpoint, Helnwein creates a
very different dynamic in "Untitled", 1998. At first glance, Helnwein
has created a more straightforward portrait. It is in naturalistic
colour executed with photorealist precision. It is not a generalised
conception but the specific portrait of a beautifulyoung girl with
blond hair and blue eyes. The work has a luminosity inspired by the
paintings of Georges de la Tour and Carravaggio.

Beyond the general attractiveness of the subject and the virtuosity of
the execution of the work, what makes us care? There is a quiet drama
going on in this painting. Her face comes out of darkness and is
starkly and artificially lit. Her face is partially in darkness, one
eye in the shadow, the other distinct and staring from the centre of
the canvas. It is an unnerving picture. Although the girl displays no
distinct emotion, one has a sense of unspoken dialogue between subject
and viewer. There is knowledge and one could even project a subtle
judgmental quality to her stare. It is as if a youth were to say to an
adult: "How could you have screwed the world up so badly?" Ultimately,
Helnwein's portraits follow what Oscar Wilde perceptively observed,
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the
artist, not of the sitter."

I cannot bear the crying of children, but when my child cries I don't
hear. Anton Checkhov

Surprisingly, the works of Gottfried Helnwein have something in common
with the art of Alfred Hitchcock. Both often deal in suspense and
mystery. Both often deal with violence or the threat of violence. What
is also true, however, is that both deal in scenes leading up to
violence or the aftermath of violence but rarely the act of violence
themselves. Like Hitchcock, Helnwein well aware that stimulating the
imagination of a viewer can create far greater drama than a literal
depiction.

In "Untitled", 1998 Helnwein has presented us with an effect without
knowledge of the cause. In his characteristic monochrome, Helnwein has
a young girl, naked except for a pair of panties, kneeling upon a
floor within a bare room. Her head is obscured by her hands that cover
her face in an implied gesture of grief, pain, or shame. The only
other piece of visual information in the work is a pail to the right
of the girl. Does the pail indicate a task forced upon the child ą la
Cinderella? The image is haunting; the emotion of the child is
undeniable, yet the viewer is left to come to her or his own internal
conclusions.

Viewing "Kiss I, 1998" is like visually eavesdropping on a potentially
explosive situation . . . or is it? Starkly lit within a dark
background, an adolescent girl in a blue dress stares out at us as a
woman, naked from the waist up, holds the girl as she kisses her. Is
this the prelude to a sexual assault? The erotic nature of the woman's
nakedness, the seemingly suggestive lifting of the girls dress by the
woman's right hand and the limp response of the girl to the kiss imply
the worst. But wait, could this not just be an act of tenderness by a
young mother to her daughter and the look of the child, the natural
aversion of adolescents to acts of affection? There is no answer from
Helnwein. For the answer, the viewer must look within himself or
herself.

There are three things that cannot be seen, even though they may be
right in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and death. Georges
Bataille

Until recently Helnwein has restricted himself to dealing with the
child as victim, wounded physically or mentally by a world it cannot
comprehend or control. Implicit in these works is that which logically
follows suffering and pain in the extreme is death. However, the
subject of death has rarely appeared in Helnwein's work until now. In
the summer of 1999, Helnwein was commissioned to do a major
installation for the Dominikanerkirche in Krems, Austria. The
installation, entitled Apokalypse was a visual assault on the senses
and the emotions. Besides the three large canvases of the Epiphany
Cycle 1996-98 and the painting Late Regret 1997, Helnwein created four
new series for this installation. The series Angels Burning depicts,
in garish colour, the faces of children as if severely burned. Saints
Silent, also in colour, depicts portraits of men grotesquely
disfigured as if from war wounds. Salved is a series, in monochromatic
blue, of men and boys both burned and disfigured. The final most
monumental and clearly disquieting of the series is Angels Sleeping, a
group of photographs with painted additions. The subject of these are
fetuses floating in a stillborn liquid atmosphere of which they will
never emerge.

"Angel Sleeping I, 1999" was part of the installation and
representative of the whole. It is as heartbreaking as it is
beautiful. This is not an image from which one can get an intellectual
distance such as Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in
the Mind of Someone Living that placed a shark in formaldehyde.
Helnwein's work is an image that was the beginning of a human being,
an individual with the prospects of feelings, aspirations, a future
... now lost. In today's contemporary art, it carries a more
pessimistic tone than the oversized infant sculptures of the British
artist Ron Mueck, but is less cynical than Marcus Harvey's portrait of
child murderer Myra Hindley made up of what appear to be the imprints
of children's hands. It is worth noting that this work would surely be
interpreted differently in the United States than in Europe. For
Americans, the image of a stillborn infant would be seen as a symbol
of the debate over the abortion issue ... the right to life movement
versus a woman's right to choose. The potential for polarisation is
far from the sense of universality that Helnwein intended with this
work.

If Gottfried Helnwein were simply the skillful renderer of facile
paintings, drawings, and photographs without meaningful content (like
so many practitioners today) his art would not be of significance. If,
in turn, Helnwein were an artist bursting with original and
provocative ideas without the skills to render those ideas into
meaningful art (also quite common in today's art world), he would not
merit the attention he deserves.

The fact, however, is that Gottfried Helnwein is the genuine article;
a skilled artist with a constantly evolving conscience that seeks
release through his art. A character in the 1976 film Network tells a
vast television audience to go to the window, open it up and shout,
"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Gottfried
Helnwein shouts with his paintbrush.

Robert Flynn Johnson
01.May.2001
Gottfried Helnwein catalogue for one-man show at Robert Sandelson
Gallery, London

The official website of Gottfried Helnwein:
http://www.helnwein.com/home/home/home.html

More texts on Gottfried Helnwein:
http://www.helnwein.org/texts/international_texts/all/index.html

Information and listing of the most important Helnwein sites:
http://www.helnwein.net/start.html