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. ...

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Most of the city pictures emerge from a deceptively simple strand of Gottfried's work, the frank photography of children's faces. He photographed over ninety children in Kilkenny. Now these kids are immortalised, larger than life in their extreme youth, and dotted around the gable-ends and walls of their native town; there eyes closed in beautiful, breathless meditation. Mounted in a manner which is normally the preserve of billboard advertising, these are quietly awesome images of the city's youngest inhabitants. ...

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. ...

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... ...

THE streets of the ancient county city of Kilkenny become a vast open air art gallery during this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival as the provocative work of Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein hangs his vast photo-realist paintings from buildings large and small including the metropolis's towering castle.
Helnwein's work, which has even led to government resignations in his native land, examines the ambivalence and hypocrisy with which unpleasant truths about the past are now viewed by society. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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James Fennell and I met Gottfried Helnwein on a bleak and blackened Wednesday afternoon shortly before Christmas 2000. He was at his castle in Kilshelan, just on the Tipperary - Waterford border, beneath which the River Suir flows. I wondered whether I'd feel intimidated in the presence of a man evidently blessed (or cursed) with the mind of a genius. I'd read a series of essays and stories about his life. His expulsion from the Viennese School of Experimental Art for painting a portrait of Adolf with his own blood. The time he'd photographed William S. Burroughs, who'd insisted on being snapped with his notorious pistol. Or Andy Warhol, a few months before he died. And, of course, there was that momentous occasion when Gottfried's "Not Worth Living", a painting of a girl dead in her soup, brought down Dr. Grosse, Head of State Psychiatry in Austria and a one-time scientist for the Nazi's genetic modification campaign that left 250,000 children dead. ...

Programme 1 - September 4th
Horizons is Lyric fm's 12-part celebration of new music
Every Monday at 10-11pm
4 Sept - 20 November 2000. ...

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One piece of public art he did in 1988 - funded fully by himself, after he failed to raise sponsorship - commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. "Again, what amazed me was that nobody talked about it - and yet that was when the horror really started."

"I wanted to do it in front of the Dome in Cologne, but the City prevented it. But there was this little strip of land which belonged to the railways, and a guy who worked there said, 'go ahead'. I didn't want to use these historic photographs which are used too often - those mountains of corpses mean nothing anymore - so I used four metre high children's faces. I photographed children from the area, foreign children, German children, Jews, anything." Mounted in a long billboard line, after the huge word "Selection", the children's faces were powdered in a deathly, bruised way, many with their eyes closed. That may sound subtle, but in the context of muted German Holocaust memorials, it was like a slap in the face. Despite CCTV video-cameras, someone painstakingly sliced the throats of every single child-portrait. ...

Tom Byrne interviews Tim O'Brien, the well-established and very famous New York based, Irish-American illustrator. His work graces the covers of such magazines as Time and Newsweek. His clients also include advertising agencies and book publishers. As established professionals go, he is among the best. In 1999 and 2000 he was even selected as one of a hundred 'Irish Americans of the Year' by Irish American Magazine. Tim, a former boxer, now enters the ring to keep fit but also works up an intense sweat by creating stunningly realistic paintings in oils to very short deadlines
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Who influences you in terms of painting?
It's a long list and not necessarily similar to my style. I did learn quite a bit from studying the work of Gottfried Helnwein, Ingres, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, Lord Leighton and Ivan Shishkin, to name a few. ...

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Project Arts Centre ...

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