Nobelpreisträgerin Elfriede Jelinek ist die Feuerwehr, wenn alle anderen noch die Hände über dem Kopf zusammenschlagen: Auf Ihrer Homepage reagiert sie auf den Fall Amstetten, als hätte sie darauf gewartet.
Irgendwie ist es schon auffällig, dass solche Dinge immer in Österreich passieren. Natascha Kampusch. Oder der Knabenmissbrauch im Priesterseminar St. Pölten. Den heiligen Pölt, der dem zusah, mag man sich gar nicht vorstellen. Er sieht wahrscheinlich aus, wie von Helnwein gemalt. Und nun Amstetten. Wenn die Öffentlichkeit schon bei Natascha Kampusch aus allen Wolken fiel, so weiß sie nun endgültig nicht mehr, wohin sie fallen soll. Darauf, auf eine so gründlich, zäh, umfassend durchgearbeitete Niedertracht war niemand gefasst. ...

In February 2008 Kresnik presented the final production of his ensemble, based on Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle, in Berlin. Kresnik's Ring was created in collaboration with the painter and scenic designer Gottfried Helnwein, who expresses himself in his works of art just as politically as Kresnik. This is apparent with the poster to the production, which was also created by Helnwein: the head of an exhausted child lying in a pool of blood, overwhelmed by a heap of Euro coins. Kresnik and Helnwein argue on the topics power and money, force and war. ...

Gottfried Helnwein’s exhibition I Walk Alone is pretty unnerving, and that is his point. Large-scale photo-realistic paintings confront the viewer like a series of film stills forming a bizarre and disturbing sequence of nightmares. Using digital photography and computer-generated images combined with classical painting techniques, many of the images are only black and white, while others use one additional color, such as red, to dramatic and horrifying effect.
The images might be seen as bits of individual stories, or pieced together in a variety of frightful ways, or seen as a generalized narrative of brutality and terror, in which innocence is perhaps relative. We are all implicated in Helnwein’s unfolding dramas. ...

"Finally we are living now in a society that is a combination of what Huxley foresaw in his "Brave new World" and Orwell in his "1984". We are caught in a stream of constant propaganda and we are under total surveillance. This is the Age of materialism, consumerism and decadence. Our heroes are idiots like trash-princess Paris Hilton, in their sad 15 minutes of fame. Children are shooting other children in schools before they kill themselves and in other parts of the world they blow themselves up in the middle of crowds.
Doesn't that look like the end of a civilization, the second fall of Rome?" ...

Der eigentliche Star der Aufführung ist nicht der schmale, langhaarige Siegfried-Darsteller Sascha Halbhuber Stead und nicht einmal der Choreograf selbst, sondern sein Bühnenbildner: der Maler Gottfried Helnwein.
Wenn über einen Zwischenvorhang nicht gerade Fritz Langs "Nibelungen"-Stummfilm oder ein Disney-Comic im Nazi-Land flimmert, beherrscht ein riesiges Krankenbett die Szene: Symbol für den Brünnhilde-Felsen. Irgendwann wird es krachend eingerissen. Immer wieder rückt zudem ein gigantischer goldener Lastwagen-Reifen ins Zentrum, Versinnbildlichung des goldenen Nibelungen-Schatzes. Zum Finale kracht aus dem Bühnenhimmel ein großer US-Wagen auf einen ganzen Autofriedhof, ehe ein Kühlschrank mit vorausgehendem Inhalt folgt. Der hing von Anfang an drohend über der Aufführung. Schließlich fallen die Flügel-Attrappen in den Orkus unter der aufgerissenen Bühne; in diesem Walhall bleibt kein Stein auf dem anderen. ...

The city's essence feeds his dark, uneasy work, which tends toward violence and the grotesque: bandaged, broken children, scenes of torture, pooling blood, grimacing visages. What he creates, regardless of the medium — watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture — is a psychological excursion into the sublimated self, the obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are unflinching and surgical. ...

Francis (Owen Wilson), der Älteste, trägt nach einem offenbar von ihm selbst verschuldeten Motorradunfall einen so fürchterlichen Kopfverband, wie ihn sonst nur der österreichische Hyperrealist Helnwein zu Leinwand bringen kann. ...

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Today, the body you were born with is no longer a “fixed” entity. In our appearance-obsessed society, people can change the physical contours of their bodies in a myriad of ways. Now, a bold new exhibition at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will explore the modern human form as it is imagined – by contemporary artists.
Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection is drawn from one of the most prominent private collections of international contemporary art in the United States. Many of the artists whose works Vicki (Vassar class of 1968) and Kent Logan have collected are known for depictions of the human form that explore issues of psychological identity, and that reinvent figuration as a conceptual tool. ...

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

“I did a fairly major restoration and paint job on the front, but to be honest, there wasn’t too much about the interior to get excited about,” says the London native, an avid modern-art collector. “The previous owner lived here for over 30 years. I had to strip away three layers of old wall coverings to expose the original brick”­—now hung with a museum-wing’s worth of photography by Todd Hido and Lucas’ ex-girlfriend Elena Dorfman, a haunting multimedia canvas by Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein called I Walk Alone and a humorous “wallpapered” self-portrait by local artist Tim Sullivan. “It was really dark and filthy,” recalls Lucas. “Now, it’s open and warm.” ...

Un iperrealismo perturbante e sconvolgente è la marca di Gottfried Helnwein, pittore, fotografo e performer austriaco che mi era sconosciuto fino a ieri e che ho scoperto attraverso Stumble. Non sapevo neanche che fosse lui l’uomo che sta dietro a “The Golden Age of Grotesque”, progetto multimediale di Marilyn Manson e, a dire il vero, a prima vista, i suoi acquerelli li avevo scambiati per fotografie. ...

Nicola Costantino creates a bleak operating room reminiscent of the French film Delicatessen. Maybe the Troglodist characters from the movie help in understanding Costantino's nod to Gottfried Helnwein? ...

Two generations of art provocateurs discuss tortured saints, world wars, and the unbearable lightness of being normal. ...

MARILYN Manson's unheated Californian pile features mounted baboon heads; a lithograph, Epiphany 1 (Adoration of the Magi) by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein, depicting the baptism of a Nazi Christ (Helnwein also shot the cover of Manson's fifth album, The Golden Age of Grotesque); and a Joachim Luetke sculpture Homunculus (a baby with chicken feet for hands and the lower body of a caterpillar). On a table, the anonymous aborted fetus in formaldehyde given to him as "a beautiful morbid gift" by his ex-wife, burlesque diva Dita von Teese. ...

Den berühmtesten Theaterplakatskandal der alten Bundesrepublik löste einst "Die Vereinigung Deutschsprachiger Bürgerinitiativen zum Schutz der Menschenwürde in Deutschland, Frankreich, Holland, Italien, Luxemburg, Österreich und Schweiz" aus. Dieses sprachliche Menschenrechtsverbrechen erstattete 1988 Strafanzeige bei der Staatsanwaltschaft Hamburg gegen ein Plakat, das Gottfried Helnwein für Peter Zadeks Inszenierung "Lulu" im Deutschen Schauspielhaus entworfen hatte. Es zeigte einen kleinwüchsigen Mann, der einer Frau in den entblößten Schritt blickt. Die Debatte darüber, ob das "Pornografie" sei, beschäftige die Feuilletons lange, denn Zadek stand im Zenit seines Ruhms, und Hamburg war noch die Pressemetropole schlechthin. ...

EDWARD HOPPER is too easily taken for granted: taciturn Yankee poet of shadow and light, capable of converting a New England manse into a Fortress of Solitude; voyeuristic stage designer of lonely apartments, a frustrated voluptuary; auteur of the diner reverie "Nighthawks," which not long ago was probably better known via Gottfried Helnwein's travesty "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." ...

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. ...

To be at Dita and Marilyn's fairytale (read fairytale, Neil Jordan-style) wedding on December 3, 2005, you would have thought that it could only have changed for the better. They exchanged vows in front of 60 guests in a non-denominational ceremony conducted by left-of-centre filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, at Castle Gurteen, the home of their friend, artist Gottfried Helnwein. You would have thought Dita and Marilyn were destined for a long and happy union. It was a conventional wedding in many ways , with no sacrifices of virgins at the altar. Dapper in a John Galliano, black silk taffeta tuxedo with velvet trim, the groom gave the bride a wedding band from William Harold Jewellers in California. Dita looked like the perfect alt-princess, in a defiantly non-white wedding dress -- a royal purple silk taffeta Vivienne Westwood gown, with a hat by Stephen Jones and shoes by Christian Louboutin. ...

But what does the hyper-realism of Austrian-born, Irish-based artist Gottfried Helnwein say to us and about us in the context of "Body Anxious"? His work is what puts this show on the map of bodily pain and anxiety. He has painted a hyper-realistic, oversized portrait of a little girl in a pink-and-white undershirt, her head and eyes swathed in gauze so recently wrapped that it glistens with blood. It is from Helnwein's "Los Caprichos" series, named after the famous Goya series. Art historians say Goya's "Caprichos" mark the beginning of the modern world of art because they were the first to look at, rather than avoid or symbolize, pain, fantasy, cruelty, disloyalty and any other number of grievous human traits. ...

The show features a moving and disturbing cast of artists, including the international hyper-realist painter and high-life art star Gottfried Helnwein of Ireland and the unpretentious, almost clinical print-maker, German-born American Kiki Smith of New York City. Others in the show include Cristin Millet of Philadelphia, Diana Falchuk of Seattle, Japanese-born Chiharu Shiota of Berlin and James R. Southard of Louisville. All have an interest in the transience of life and its cultural mysteries. ...