Gottfried helnwein biography books

The grown-ups seemed to me to be ugly, ponderous and bad-tempered. My parents were actually lovely people, but were shy and timid, and trapped in their lower middle class world. Helnwein: It was a world that had experienced Armageddon twice: the collapse of the monarchy, the rise and fall of Nazi rule, two World wars lost. From the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs, all that remained was the capital city with a bit of land around it, largely cut off from the world by the iron curtain.

Of course, the government, the justice system and the bureaucracy were full of ex-Nazis. And you could feel it. Helnwein: Actually I always just refer to children. Man as an androgynous being. And mostly it is girls of a particular age who have this quality, like apparitions from another world rather than flesh and blood. What do you think passers-by in Waterford make of the portraits, some of which are bathed in blood: what do you think goes through their heads?

There have been lots of calls made to the town hall or the radio station. Some are enthralled by the installation and others get worked-up about it. But the Irish also have quite a sense of patriotism, or has this more to do with the preservation of culture? Helnwein: The Irish have never started a war of aggression in their entire history, though invaders have marched in time and again.

The English occupied Ireland for years and they treated the people like slaves. They were not allowed to own any land, were forbidden to use their own language and in the 19th century the population was halved as a result of the great famine. Despite all this, no one has succeeded in breaking the Irish. The Irish identity has been maintained through the years by their music and literature.

These large-format billboards all over the city with my images of children might be like another invasion: representing something of a challenge to the people here. A lot of foreigners have moved here in the last few years, looking for work — from Asia and Africa and about , people from Poland alone. When we arrived, 12 years ago, I had the feeling of being at home for the first time in my life.

Now, advertisers want to sell — but what is your agenda? Are you aiming to provide food for thought? At first people have no idea what these pictures are about. People have to find their own answers to these pictures. For me art is a dialogue. And as Marcel Duchamp said when he defined art, these two poles, artist and observer are necessary, in order to make something like electricity.

The people are affected emotionally, they talk about it, they are enthralled or they are outraged and protest. How would you describe yourself. Does it actually take a good dose of humour to even be able to deal with such dark themes? Helnwein: I had absolutely no choice. It was ordained by my environment and art was simply my way of trying to break free.

Do you have an exact vision in mind of how the picture should look before you start and does it stretch out over a long period of time? As a rule I work in cycles. For me, working with children is very inspiring. I leave it up to the intuition of the individual child. A photo session usually runs like a game, and the child and I develop what takes place together.

I found just such a child here in Waterford. Chick Corea. Gisela Vetter-Liebenow ,. Peter Gorsen. Peter Selz ,. Klaus Honnef. Susan Crowley Collaborator. Alf Krauliz ,. Peter Zawrel ,. Wolfgang Bauer. Stella Rollig ,. Nava Semel ,. To add more books, click here. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.

Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Want to Read saving… Error rating book. Gottfried Helnwein by Gottfried Helnwein 4. Helnwein by Gottfried Helnwein 4. Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture critic, wrote: "Helnwein's large format, photo-realist images of children of various demeanors boldly probed the subconscious.

Innocence, sexuality, victimization and haunting self-possession surge and flicker in Helnwein's unnerving work". Actionistic self-portrayals in the manner of a happening featuring his injured and bandaged body and surgical instruments deforming his face go back to Helnwein's student days. Since then, bandages have become part of the aesthetic "uniform" of his self-portraits.

The artist exposed himself as victim and martyr: bandages around his head and forks and surgical instruments piercing his mouth or cheek. Frequently the distortions of these tormented images make it difficult to recognize Helnwein's face. He appears as a screaming man, mirroring the frightening aspects of life: a twentieth-century Man of Sorrows.

His frozen cry, showing the artist in a state of implacable trauma, recalls Edvard Munch 's Scream and Francis Bacon 's screaming popes. Some of Helnwein's grimacing faces also recall the grotesque physiognomic distortions by the eighteenth-century Viennese sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt. They could also be seen as part of the Austrian pictorial tradition that resurfaced in the perturbed and distorted expressionist faces painted by Kokoschka and Egon Schiele before World War I, reappearing in the exaggerated mimicry in Arnulf Rainer's "Face Farces".

William S. Burroughs commented on Helnwein's self-portraits in an essay in There is a basic misconception that any given face, at any given time, looks more or less the same, like a statue's face. Actually, the human face is as variable from moment to moment as a screen on which images are reflected, from within and from without. Gottfried Helnwein's paintings and photographs attack this misconception, showing the variety of faces of which any face is capable.

And in order to attack the basic misconception, he must underline and exaggerate by distortion, by bandages and metal instruments that force the face into impossible molds. Images of torture and madness abound, as happens from moment to moment in the face seen as a sensitive reflection of extreme perceptions and experience.

Gottfried helnwein biography books

How can a self-portrait depict statuesque calm in the face of the horrors that surround us all? In a conversation with Robert A. Sobieszek, curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , Helnwein declared: "The reason why I took up the subject of self-portraits and why I have put myself on stage was to function as a kind of representative for the suffering, abused and oppressed human being.

I needed a living body to demonstrate and exemplify the effect of violence inflicted upon a defenseless victim. There is nothing autobiographical or therapeutical about it, and I don't think it says anything about me personally. Also I was the best possible model for my experiments: endlessly patient and always available. Another strong element in his works are comics.

Helnwein has sensed the superiority of cartoon life over real life ever since he was a child. Growing up in a dreary, destroyed post-war Vienna , the young boy was surrounded by unsmiling people, haunted by a recent past they could never speak about. What changed his life was the first German-language Donald Duck comic book that his father brought home one day.

Opening the book felt like finally arriving in a world where he belonged: "a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and perforated by bullets without serious harm. A world in which the people still looked proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses. Alicia Miller commented on Helnwein's work in Artweek : "In 'The Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous.

Much of the work has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child's world are rent with something untoward. For children, not understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape.

Perhaps nothing in the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein's ' Mickey '. His portrait of Disney's favorite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer.

This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde , his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed. Helnwein's Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless. But Mickey's terrifying demeanor hints of things to come Although Helnwein's work is rooted in the legacy of German expressionism , he has absorbed elements of American pop culture.

In the s, he began to include cartoon characters in his paintings. In several interviews he claimed: "I learned more from Donald Duck than from all the schools that I have ever attended.