SINCERE sympathy is extended to the Helnwein and O'Shea families on the sad bereavement last the week of Alva Helnwein (nee O'Shea) in Eindhoven, Holland, after a short illness.
Prayers go out to friends and family of Alva Helnwein (nee O'Shea), who has passed away. ...

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group show
Artists support Nazareth House in Cape Town South Africa.
Nazareth House is a world respected organisation dedicated to the stable and secure care of children in need. The Sisters of Nazareth were asked to care for one HIV baby in 1992 and since then, in their centre and their township outreach programmes, they have looked after more than 250 HIV infected babies and children. ...

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. ...

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Antje Vollmer, vice-speaker of German parliament, spends her vacation at the home of Gottfried Helnwein and his family in Ireland where she meets with artists, writers, actors, musicians and other people active in the fields of culture.
For the past 3 years, every summer, Gottfried Helnwein is inviting creative people from all over the world to stay at his home in Ireland.
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Kiltinane, Tipperary ...

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Ireland got its first real glimpse into the mind of Gottfried Helnwein in August of this year when he headlined the increasingly high profile Kilkenny Arts Festival. Across the medieval city, familiar landmarks were draped in gigantic posters bearing the Helnwein trademark. Huge freckle-faced Kilkenny children - their eyes closed and vulnerable yet possessed of a curious wisdom - occupied the walls from St Canice's Cathedral to the courtyard of Kilkenny castle. Dominating the Castle entrance was a massive print entitled "Epiphany", depicting a voluptuous mother proudly displaying her naked young boy to a gathering of sharp-dressed officers. It is only when one registers the swastikas and iron crosses on the officers' uniforms that one looks again at this toddler and beholds the unmistakeable mug of Adolf Hitler Junior. This was a bold statement by Gottfried in which he was effectively drawing a comparison between the iconoclastic and suppressive nature of the Nazi system and the more disturbing tenets of Roman Catholicism. ...

A controversial "Nazi" image by artist Gottfried Helnwein was daubed with red paint last week as Kilkenny Arts Festival entered its final days. Another Helnwein print, of a local girl, was set on fire and extensively damaged.

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.
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...
His beautiful photographs of Kilkenny children are, collectively, a recognisable derivative of his work Selection, which implicitly placed the viewer in the position of someone marking children for extermination. Strong stuff.
If that seems irrelevant in an Irish context, one could always point to Northern Ireland and to the scandals that have shaken the complacent authority of church and state in recent years.
What is more innocent, more open, more charming than the face of a child? Except that we are more than ever uncomfortably aware that the act of looking is not at all innocent, and Helnwein's children, with their closed, downcast eyes, decline to meet our collective gaze. Why? Perhaps because they insist on remaining within the orbits of their imaginations.
There is also, however, a slight unease arising from the uniformity of the images and the awareness that the subjects are being directed. Helnwein has a knack for throwing responsibility for what we are looking at back onto us, the viewers. ...

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A spokesman for the festival said they were "disappointed and saddened" that the images had been attacked. He said Mr Helnwein's work had provoked a strong reaction throughout the festival. "There have been a lot of positive comments but there has been negative reaction as well."
The images have been a major talking point since before the festival began. A former mayor of the city, Mr Paul Cuddihy, initially objected to a painting being hung on the City Hall for fear it might be misinterpreted as lending support to Nazism. After meeting Mr Helnwein at his studio in Co Tipperary, however, Mr Cuddihy said the artist's work was "astonishingly good".

Kilkenny Arts Festival said the artist had a long and acknowledged record of taking a firm stand against Nazism and fascism. ...