...

Waterford Fringe Festival will present a spectacular outdoor exhibition of Helnweins work in September of this year. The exhibition involves a series of his paintings screen printed to very large images and displayed on prominent Waterford city centre premises, one of Ireland's largest ever outdoor exhibitions. ...

Exhibition Catalogue ...

...

Gottfried Helnwein's classic yet unnerving images transform sentimental representations of childhood into portraits of individual subjects frozen at the moment of suffering. His photo-paintings pirouette on the fine line between chocolate box pictures/excessive sentimentality and the cost to children of being treated as commodities, of suffering emotional or physical pain at a grown-up's hands.
High pictorial and technical values create compositions that recall contemporary cinema and seventeenth-century painting, expanding the treatment of time into epic. This apparent grandiosity plays against the immediacy of each suffering subject, underlining the different experience of time in childhood. Small hurts can devastate when you're a child. Big hurts stay with you for years, as survivors of Hitler's Anschluss testify.
Now, in the age of virtual use and abuse of children, Helnwein's insistence on valuing the humanity and charm of the littlest, the least powerful, offers a counterpoint to claims that suffering counts most when you're grown-up. It opens his practice into a series of pictorial mise-en-scènes, as did Rembrandt's tableaux in The Blinding of Samson (1636) or The Night Watch (1642). ...

...

Helen McInerney reports on work and life of Gottfried Helnwein and his family in Co Tipperary. ...

...

...

Publication Date: February 12, 2008 ...

Opening the Fringe with a Helnwein exhibition is a daring and high profile undertaking and such is his international reputation that it brought out a huge crowd. Emer Powell, one of the Fringe directors, described getting Helnwein to Waterford was like getting Mick Jagger to play in Ally McLoughlins. ...

...

...

...

Gottfried Helnwein: I think moving to Ireland 10 years ago was a good decision. I love it when we are all at our Irish castle, family kids and dogs and other artist friends, everybody working on somethimg somewhere in the house, and when we all meet in the dining room for lunch, with Bach or Vivaldi music... it's very italian and Baroque. And I like the contrast to downtown LA where we spend the other half of the year.
Mercedes Helnwein: It would be a little claustrophobic to have no escape from L.A.
It's a very intense place, so you need to be able to get out when necessary to be able to breathe and gather some sanity.
Gottfried: I always love going back to Ireland. When we first arrived here, ten years ago, I had that feeling of being "home" for the first time in my life. I feel so connected to that land, the people and their struggle throughout history. Whenever I come back and see that green island through the window of the plane, I am deeply moved.
On the other hand it's so idyllic and peaceful to live in the midst of these bucolic landscapes, that after several months I know its time to go back to Gotham City to connect up with reality again. ...

The Team behind Waterford’s upcoming art festival are working feverishly on their events calendar for September. Heading the list of Artists is Gottfried Helnwein. Who?? He’s a world renowned artist who has decamped from his native Austria to settle in Co. Waterford. His work spans the globe from Montreal, Denver, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Columbia, Linz and St. Petersburg. ...

Waterford Fringe Festival have announced the participation of internationally acclaimed artist, Gottfried Helnwein, in this years Festival. Although born and educated in post-war Vienna, Helnwein now lives in his castle in Co Waterford. He has exhibited worldwide and is delighted with the opportunity to show his work in what he considers his home, Waterford, next September in Greyfriers Gallery as part of the Fringe Festival. ...

Former Vice-president and Managing Editor of the "San Francisco Chronicle" ...

Choreografisches Theater
Johann Kresnik wird mit Gottfried Helnwein in der kommenden Spielzeit den "Ring des Nibelungen" als Choreographisches Theater auf der Bonner Opernbühne weiterführen. Nach "Das Rheingold" und "Die Walküre" in der Spielzeit 2006/07 wird 2007/08 "Siegfried / die Götterdämmerung" als zweiter und letzter Teil folgen. ...

Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin. Of all his paintings, the most disturbing is Epiphany (1996), for which he dips into our collective memory of Christianity's most famous birth. This Austrian Catholic Nativity scene has no magi bearing gifts. Madonna and child are encircled by five respectful Waffen SS officers palpably in awe of the idealised, kitsch-blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on Mary's lap, stares defiantly out of the canvas. Helnwein's baby Jesus is Adolf Hitler.
(Julia Pascal, New Statesman, UK, "Nazi Dreaming", April 10, 2006) ...