Although born and educated in post-war Vienna, Gottfried Helnwein is
very much an international artist, with exhibitions of his work being
held in cities such as San Francisco, Beijing and St. Petersburg. His
paintings represent a fusion of historic and contemporary artistic
practices, uniting the Romantic aesthetic of Caspar David Friedrich,
the political radicalism of Viennese Actionists and the technical
precision of the photorealists of the 1970’s. Although often based on
photographs, or inspired by film stills, his paintings are built up in
fine layers of traditional oil paint and represent a degree of
technical accomplishment rarely seen in European academies. He uses
this technical accomplishment and finesse to carry across the strong
political message contained in his art.

From the early nineteenth century up to the Nazi era, Vienna was a city
where extraordinary advances in medicine, psychology and political and
social theory took place. Helnwein’s art draws inspiration from this
city. His portraits of children, vulnerable and damaged, can be read as
a commentary on psychoanalysis, where internalised traumas are brought
to the surface. Pioneeered in Vienna, Freudian psychoanalysis was too
easily used to suppress acknowledgement of child abuse. In his
conflation of Nazi propaganda with Catholic iconography, Helnwein
critiques the denial of history that enveloped his native country in
the 1950’s. His paintings of Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse
evoke consumer capitalism, the theoretical underpinnings of which were
developed in Vienna by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and
transferred, as with so much of the intellectual and artistic life of
Vienna, to the United States in the 1930’s. The ruins of post-war
Vienna formed the backdrop for Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a film
which, perhaps not coincidentally, also deals with the damage caused to
children by the moral corruption of adults.

The landscapes, and a cityscape of Vienna, presented in this exhibition
draw these different threads together. Helnwein takes the panorama,
that heroic nineteenth century attempt to contain all knowledge in a
single image, and suborns the green hills of Ireland to his
contemporary take on the imperial gaze. In like fashion he paints large
vistas of the Arizona desert, a landscape so different from the lush
Irish fields and yet also very connected, through emigration and
through images in the films of John Ford, whose Irish sensibility
helped shape the mythology of the American West. Many of Helnwein’s
paintings are of interiors, dark and claustrophobic. These large
panoramic landscapes are a relatively late development in his work and,
while they eschew the narrative, they clearly reveal the visionary
quality of his art.

Peter Murray Director, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork