Gottfried Helnwein looks more like a rock star than an internationally acclaimed artist. Dressed all in black, with a bandanna around his head and dark glasses hiding his eyes, he resembles, in a superficial way, Bono. Like Bono, he is concerned about the most troubling issues of our times: violence, inhumanity and oppression.
There is a cinematic quality to all of Helnwein's works, which seem to be projected on a wide screen. These "stilled cinematic moments," as Crocker curator Diana Daniels calls them, are powerfully affecting. "He deals with difficult subjects in a way that isn't propagandistic," Daniels said. "It's an open-ended way of dealing with historic subjects that are in danger of slipping away from us." Many of the images are very disturbing, and the museum has issued a warning that some images may be challenging for sensitive or younger viewers. But the show is a powerful one, posing questions we all need to contemplate. ...

Palm Beach County Convention Center
650 Okeechobee Boulevard, West Palm Beach
Visit us at booth 303. ...

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The exhibition GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN - INFERNO OF THE INNOCENTS at the Crocker Art Museum opens on Friday, January 28th from 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm.
Like a modern-day Goya, Gottfried Helnwein’s art addresses themes of inhumanity, violence and the virtue of personal expression. Over more than four decades, the artist has pursued a singular, radical vision realized in monumental paintings and photographs. ...

VAIL, Colo.—Last year, Vicki and Kent Logan made headlines when they announced a $60 million-plus bequest to the Denver Art Museum—the largest planned gift in the museum’s 113-year history. That gift includes a promise of the Logan house and the private 7,500-square-foot museum situated next door.
The Colorado-based couple has been active on museum boards for many years and has donated extensively to the Denver museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. ...

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Our regular feature, Collection Rotation. Each month a guest organizes an exhibition from our collection works online. Maria Naula works in SFMOMA’s Accessions Department supervising the acquisitions process, and it's possible she knows the collection, at least as it's grown over the last decade, more comprehensively than anyone on staff. Welcome! ...

We met with Helnwein a day after his solo exhibition opened at Friedman Benda in New York. The minute he sat down and started talking, it was as if we were catching up with an old friend. He held nothing back. We discussed our respective childhood experiences, Austrian guilt, isolation, his practice, the importance of art, and what it's like to live in a castle. Helnwein is a real person. ...

Viewers as well as critics describe his work as grotesque, audacious, shocking, and insulting. One who sees him in person is rather surprised at the fact that he is sane.
His works are largescale, photorealistic paintings of horror. The artist has worked in diverse genres including watercolor, oil, and installation. However, his work's primary theme has always referenced his childhood. He does not render the beauty of childhood but spits an audacious, persistent interpretation of war, crime, damage, and holocaust. In "Adoration of the Magi", painted in 1996, for example, five men in Gestapo-like uniforms encircle a baby interpreted as Jesus or Hitler. Helnwein projects his weird vision without hesitation. Despite this uncanny quality, his works gain a high reputation, and are collected by many prestigious art museums around the world, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Smithsonian Museum. ...

Desde una edad temprana, el joven Helnwein vio en la represión e intolerncia propias de la educación católica un paralelismo del fascismo. Después de abandonar la escuela por esos motivos, fue admitido en el Institute of Higher Graphic Instruction, conocido por tener tendencias "experimentales". Como protesta ante la rigidez de la institución, cortó su mano con una navaja y dibujó a Adolf Hitler con su propia sangre. EI acto le valió la expulsión, así como una clara conciencia sobre el poder de una imagen. Terminó sus estudios en la Academia de Artes de Viena. ...

Helnwein is highly recommended even to those who do not have a predilection for morbid or grotesque art, for his intention is not merely to shock or titillate. Whereas many modern artists get lost in the artifice of excessive conceptualism, Gottfried Helnwein continues to produce challenging, thought-provoking work based on the weight of the subject matter, not the way in which it is presented. Having produced a wide range of imagery in a variety of mediums, Helnwein’s development is fascinating to trace from conceptual beginnings to his current synthesis of pop and fine art. ...

Using the metaphor of youthful innocence as a means to reveal the age-old violence that continues to permeate our times, Gottfried Helnwein produces impeccable realist paintings that send shivers down the spine. Casting children in the roles of both perpetrators and victims of war and terror, the LA-based artist strikes a sensitive nerve with his haunting visual narratives. ...

Here, Decadence is envisioned as a response to apocalypse, economic turmoil and the effects of late capitalism. Decadence Now!: Visions of Excess reaches back to the 1970s to examine pre-millennial rumblings of alienation, aestheticism, morbidity, pornography, intoxication and madness in the art of Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gilbert and George, Keith Haring, Gottfried Helnwein, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, Zhang Peng, Pierre et Gilles, Andres Serrano, Joel-Peter Witkin, David Wojnarowicz and many others. ...

During the past several years, the concepts of decadence have begun to appear more and more in art theory, often in relation to current art. Decadence is one of the continual properties of modern art. The commonness of the concept of decadence, or its parallel existence outside of the sphere of art, also enables new methodological processes and combinations, and discovers new territories and relationships. Decadent art is excessive, it exceeds the level of what is generally acceptable, and it provocatively demolishes the most sensitive taboos. Decadence is also firmly connected to the clear stance of outsider individualism.
Starting on the 1970's, we can monitor the continual effort of the artists like Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Nobuyoshi Araki, Jake a Dinos Chapman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Damien Hirst, Zhang Peng, Keith Haring, Andres Serrano, Gottfried Helnwein etc. to work with typical decadent themes. ...

I know his paintings since I was a little child and made my first steps in a museum- and for me he`s definitely the artist that evokes the most intensive feelings that I Know. ...

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... his startling body of work: macabre paintings with photographic resonance played out on a grand scale and often in public settings. Throughout his career, Helnwein has glided easily between watercolor, oil and installation work, but his big subject has always been childhood, and not the happy sort. With titles like ‘‘The Murmur of the Innocents’’ and ‘‘God of Sub-Humans,’’ these works — executed with obsessive, old-master-worthy technique — can be as bludgeoning as, say, a Rammstein riff, but you can’t take your eyes off them. ...

I didn’t become an artist because I thought I knew the answers. But I had questions. When I started painting I was like an autistic child. I had no contact with the so-called “Higher Arts.” My aesthetics were inspired by poorly painted saints from the late 19th century, Donald Duck comics, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, and the Rolling Stones. Originally I didn’t even want to become an artist. As a kid I thought painters were boring old guys with beards and berets standing in front of easels and painting abstract canvases all day long. Being a member of the Rolling Stones seemed to me more like the ideal form of existence as an artist. ...

Salvador Dali's "Hitler Masturbating" is a masterpiece of satire, or so says my inner Beavis, anyhow. Gottfried Helnwein's painting Epiphany I is another excellent example, reminding us that not only was Hitler once a baby, but also that we can recognize him without his mustache. ...