"Two days after the Sandy Hook school massacre, a survival gear company called Black Dragon Tactical composed a new slogan to promote sales of armored backpack inserts. “Arm the teachers,” the company declared on Facebook. “In the meantime, bulletproof the kids.”...
The question may be political, but the keenest response is to be found in a museum in Mexico City, the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, at a retrospective of paintings and photographs by the Austrian-American artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein’s extraordinary work depicts the fragile innocence of children. Devoid of grown-up sentimentalism, his images can be overwhelming, especially those that show how that innocence falters in an adult world."

"An artist with conscience, a fearless man with a penchant for profoundly bizarre and complex, meaningful images, Gottfried Helnwein is making a grand re-entry to San Francisco. His work was exhibited here four years ago when his freaky mixed-media portrait of Mickey Mouse - "Mouse I" - was part of the SF Museum of Modern Art's "The Darker Side of Playland - Childhood Imagery."
The paintings are extraordinary, grotesque, powerful, "difficult" and challenging, according to the curator of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums) exhibit, Robert Flynn Johnson.
They are all that, and more. A simple description of the works, without context, would only indicate a freak show: a photo-like painting of Hitler with two very Aryan-looking children, an actual bar of soap encased under them; a group of uniformed Nazis gazing adoringly on a contemporary Mother and Child (Helnwein explaining that the people in the photograph that was the basis for the painting were actually surrounding Hitler); images of normal children mixed with misshapen, ill, tortured youngsters. "Why would people cause so much pain to others?" Helnwein asks, and he shows the pain, unflinchingly, but not to titillate the demented or to horrify the ignorant.
"The Child" (exhibition) - located in a part of the Legion next to a permanent exhibit of Renaissance Mother and Child images by Pontormo, Tintoretto, Raphael, and others - has far more to offer than politics, morality, controversy and horror. Although there is no doubt that primarily Helnwein is "the artist as provocateur," he is also an artist in the sense of creating unique and lasting images."

"Kinderporträts, Schmerz, Missbrauch und Gewalt, empfunden von einer nachgeborenen Generation. Sein ganzes Lebenswerk hat Helnwein diesem Thema gewidmet, eine eigene Bildsprache dafür gefunden, Kämpfe dafür ausgestanden. Er hat das Kinderleid aus dem Persönlichen ins Universelle gehoben, es über die Zeit verfolgt, bis zu den Schulmördern, den Kinderkriegern."

"Helnweins Bilder wirken!"

"Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. Like Wong from Asia and Cindy Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation.
The child’s face – painted in a realistic style yet eerily unreal – may allude to the uncertain (in limbo-like) quality of Helnwein’s own childhood. Helnwein is among a network of contemporary artists expressing visions that embrace and also transcend cultural nomenclature. "

"Helnwein will most certainly attain an appropriate place within the lively history of Austrian art and scandal, which includes the works of Schiele, Gerstl, Schoenberg and others, as well as, the "Viennese Action group"

"...Immendorf als "deutscher" Geschichtsmaler, Helnwein als österreichischer."

"Helnwein likes to linger at boundaries.
Whoever wants to pass through is closely examined by him. Like Goya he is one of the magic customs officials of art. (Rousseau, on the other hand, always stayed on the other side of the border even though he really was a customs official by profession!)
Whoever wants to enter the plane of art has to be able to understand and communicate reality. Helnwein is not only an artist but also a perfect transformer.
The so called imagination should not come into play at the beginning of a world, but its nuclear power should be released only at the moment of transformation, of metamorphosis."

"Helnwein has always said that he paints children because they symbolize humanity better than adults. This may be so, but perhaps Helnwein's images are so profoundly disturbing because of the disparity between the portrayal of children- in all their idealized purity- and the portrayal of suffering. His work is a mesmerizing commentary not only on the exploitation of children in our culture, but also on emotional vacancy and moral torpor, which too often implicate us in the pain of others. By consciously mingling his themes of purity and culpability, Helnwein has presented viewers with a disorienting yet provocative way of apprehending both history and suffering."

"Helnwein's preoccupation with the dark side of modern history, including its abuse of images, has never left him. He did a whole series of paintings so dark as to appear imageless. But he intended them not as mirrors of dark times but as counterthrusts to the aggressive reach of so much contemporary culture.
People will respond to his concern with the power of images.
We willingly subject ourselves to their power every day without really understanding it. If nothing else, his pictures, no matter how confrontational, stand still and permit us, even defy us, to understand how they work upon us."

"The viewer is lured into pondering whether the lone figure of a child in a muted pink dress is asleep on the ground, or has been hit by a roadside in a puddle, or on white sand in the sun?
Few parents are likely to trot such a painting home to hang over the family hearth, but the artist's ability to conjure up open-ended dramatic narrative is unquestionable.
...people caught in poses and with facial expressions that leave everything to the imagination: Are they happy or sad? Asleep or dead? Singing or letting forth with primal screams? - Cleverly conceived conundrums."

"Helnwein's work is perfectly executed proof of the mastery of all the available means to outdo the reality in depiction.
Only in this way was Helnwein able to trigger the shock that he intended, a shock with a possible healing effect.
Helnwein developed a visual language depicting apocalyptic visions that can be understood all over the world. The beautiful and the ugly, the fear of the terrible and the power of its fascination, the clearly recognisable and that which cannot be interpreted but lurks outside the painting as well as outside the nursery door, and more closely intertwined in these pictures than those of any other living artist."

"Gottfried Helnwein is a brave virtuoso of versatility. In his work, he forces us to confront, via his visual wit, brio, and candor, the human face of violence and angst.
Helnwein's work prods us to react, yet not simply because it is "shocking". His main message in fact is: be brave. Be daring. And most importantly, be willing to confront even the darkest side of human nature - after all, it's something we cannot escape. "

"Look at Helnwein's painting under Visual Sociology. What was Helnwein saying? Why was he willing to offend. Why did one of my students make a giant box that when opened had a lovely smiling face inside that said "F^&* the Patriot Act"?? Isn't that a lot like what Helnwein and Kiefer and Beuys were doing? Maybe saying "wake up and look at what you're doing?"

"Austria has been one of the main hubs of European culture, especially in music and art. The artists are not always conventional or conformist. Like the recent Nobel Prize winner for literature, Elfriede Jelinek, some of Helnwein’s work, which takes an uncomfortable look at Austria’s past and the unhealthily close relationship between Church and Sate in the Nazi era, has caused controversy.
I think we should be in no doubt that we are in the presence of the work of an artist of exceptional stature."

"Your paintings have left a deep impact on me.
To be honest - they have shocked me.
I have thought about it for a long time and came finally to the conclusion, that people should be confronted with these images to be inspired to think."

"In a moving exhibition at the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hannover, paintings of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein are on view. One of his paintings shows a girl with a rascally face wearing an armband for the blind, with her tongue sticking out. At first I smiled. If you keep looking at this painting, you will see that the girl has blood running down the inside of her legs. The child obviously was abused, force was used against her... yes, children are vulnerable. Childhood can be terrible, when children are at the mercy of someone.
- I'm thinking of the 12 year old Judith Wischnajatskaja, who wrote her last letter in July 1942: "Dear Father! With death I bid you goodbye. We would like to live so much but we are not allowed, we will perish. I am so afraid of this death because the little children are thrown into the pit alive."

"Helnwein's Images are shocking - may it be through drastic depiction of the opressing or opressed human being, or through the deconstruction of conventional and accommodating pictures.
Is it possible that the reason for the outraged reaction lies in the beholder himself?
Helnwein is an exceedingly political artist, not through big speeches but through the message of his art. That's why his work is important especially in times where artists often confine themself to shallow fun-culture. "

"The theme of violence and the theme “he as victim” proceed from Beckmann’s early work from 1907 till today.
Bruce Naumann, Marcel Odenbach, Jeff Wall und Gottfried Helnwein changed the artistic means radically but not the theme itself.
Helnwein’s fascinating oeuvre embraces total antipodes. Helnwein is an artist of uncompromising expression: The trivial, for example the Disney-culture, alternates with visions of spiritual doom, the divine in the child contrasts with horror-images of child-abuse.
But violence remains to be his basic theme, - the physical and the emotional suffering, inflicted by one human being unto another."

"The grin found on the faces of ill-treated children, a grotesque picture puzzle which includes both the martyrdom and subversion of mankind is entirely Helnwein’s invention. It is manifested in the metamorphic images of injured bodies. It is an obsessive pattern which is repeated in Helnwein’s pictoral representation of the world and in his staged artistic actions, serving as a metaphor for the invulnerability and invincibility deeply seated in man."