In the Republican Last Chance Saloon is a Norman Rockwell-style McCain, talking tough about Czechoslovakia, Iraq and jobs with blue-collar workers. (How early 1990s of him.) They paint Obama as a 1950s-style Gottfried Helnwein figure. But instead of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean in the diner, Obama sits alongside Paris and Britney. McCain gives new meaning to "Audacity Watch" with his sexually provocative, racially charged, dumbed-down subliminal ad campaign. ...

Described as controversial, provocative and undoubtedly larger than life, the works of Austrian born, Waterford-based artist Gottfried Helnwein, is acclaimed world wide. ...

...

...

Sie wollen nicht wie Stimmvieh behandelt werden, das zur Urne getrieben wird. Mit Ausnahme von drei "Nein" sagenden Parlamentsabgeordneten steht ihnen die ganze politische Klasse geschlossen gegenüber. Damit stellt sich gewissermaßen die Politik als solche zur Wahl. Umso größer die Versuchung, "der" Politik einen Denkzettel zu verpassen. Heute ist diese Versuchung überall groß.
Über die Motive des irischen Neins lässt sich nur spekulieren. Dagegen sind die ersten Reaktionen von offizieller Seite eindeutig. Die aufgescheuchten Regierungen wollen nicht ratlos erscheinen, sie suchen nach einer technischen Lösung. Diese läuft auf eine Wiederholung des irischen Referendums hinaus. Das ist der pure Zynismus der Macher gegenüber dem verbal bezeugten Respekt vor dem Wähler - und Wasser auf die Mühlen derer, die munter darüber diskutieren, ob nicht die halbautoritären Formen der andernorts praktizierten Fassadendemokratien besser funktionieren. ...

Ali Helnwein’s ‘Destroy your Beautiful Life' brings the album to a close and provides a touch of musical levity, while losing nothing in depth. It is probably the clarity of the mix, and the careful, considerate re-rendering of the original composition on lush piano and/or synths that makes this such a cathartic moment, and a highlight in terms of music and mood. The surprising clarity of Wolfgang’s guttural, growled vocals is juxtaposed expertly with the almost-ambient musical canvas here – more so than in any existing beauty/beast metal dichotomy that springs to mind. ...

...

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. ...

...

...

...