Helnwein is still painting Disasters, surpassing the ten-year span that Goya worked on his print sequence. The seventy-ninth painting, completed earlier this year, is featured in Eyes That Knew No Shade Of Sin Or Fear, a major new exhibition of Helnwein's magisterial art, which will go on view at Modernism gallery beginning May 6th. Depicting a young girl holding an Uzi, looking away from a grinning Mickey Mouse, The Disasters of War 79 powerfully conveys the urge children feel to fortify themselves against the atrocities pervading modern society, and their struggle to remain true to their guileless fantasies.

These psychological tensions, and the insights they provide about the fraught conditions of the contemporary world, reverberate throughout the exhibition of thirteen paintings, all completed in 2021. Although they vary considerably in their iconography - evoking artists ranging from John Everett Millais to Edward Hopper - the artworks are unified by the moral impulse Helnwein identifies with Goya, which he describes as the compulsion to "force people to look at things they would rather not look at."

MODERNISM INC., 724 Ellis Street, San Francisco, CA 94121

May 6 - July 2, 2021, open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5:30pm