Essentially a hyperrealist artist of quite extraordinary facility, Gottfried Helnwein's huge Photorealist canvases are awash with references to religious Renaissance paintings, the dark allure of Nazi imagery and his background in the ruins of post war Vienna. His strategy is often of deliberate shock and provocation, from his earliest extreme watercolors of doll-like, wounded children with their hare-lips and facial disfigurements, which prompted cartoonist Robert Crumb to call him "a very fine artist and one sick mother---er."