ARTISTHelnwein

The cover for Giroux’s 2nd edition features another of the brilliant artworks by the Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein (Aktion Sorgenkind). Featuring a blinded child on a rundown street, her hands are tied by a ribbon that reach beyond the page. This image is perfect for a text that spans nearly half a century of critical effort. This unseeing child is the counterpoint to the blinded Oedipus who also shaped by the rubble of his times, knew his fate and had it mapped out in advance. The ambiguity to the image is striking. Should we look upon it from the Western gaze, invariably we would scan from left to right, hence witnessing the child present yet puppeteered by a force that is invisible and beyond the pale.

The Austro-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein is responsible for the artworks in this issue. With his hyper-realistic pictures, whose most common subjects are pain, injury and violence, Helnwein (born in 1948) is certainly one of the best-known and at the same time most controversial of German-speaking artists.

... 1988 wollte dann sogar die Münchner Abendzeitung die kleine Aufregung um Gottfried Helnweins Plakat zu Peter Zadeks ” Lulu“-Inszenierung kaum noch einen Skandal nennen und setzte den Begriff in Anführungszeichen: Das Bild, auf dem ein kleiner Mann den nackten Unterleib einer Frau betrachtet, wurde in zahlreichen Zeitungen nachgedruckt..

30 Porträts von "Spiegel"-Autor Helmut Sorge. Lebensläufe und Schicksale von Maria Altmann über Gottfried Helnwein bis Thomas Gottschalk und Wolfgang Petersen. Mit einem Vorwort von Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Cover: Gottfried Helnwein, The Murmur of the Innocents 3, 2009

Ripubblicato, presso Rizzoli, “Il violino di Auschwitz” della scrittrice catalana, scomparsa dieci anni fa. Un libro affascinante e coinvolgente che narra la storia (vera) di un liutaio ebreo costretto a mettersi al servizio di un comandante del terribile lager, appassionato amante della musica e degli strumenti che servono per la sua esecuzione. Desta, tuttavia, perplessità e varie obiezioni la nuova traduzione a firma di Margherita D’Amico, che appare chiaramente di seconda mano.

It’s a foggy, cloud-streaked afternoon in Waterford County, Ireland. I’m meeting a man who has spent a large part of his life on this island that is famously steeped in tradition. He’s called this place home for some while. Ireland has a long history of treating its artists, literary figures and musicians well.

Louis le Brocquy, Sean Scully, Tony O'Malley, Hughie O'Donoghue, Gottfried Helnwein, Basil Blackshaw, Dorothy Cross, William Crozier, Mary FitzGerald, Martin Gale, Elizabeth Magill, Janet Mullarney, Paul Nugent, Linda Quinlan.

LARGE-scale art installations dotted around Waterford’s city centre depicting war images are causing controversy because of their graphic content. The exhibition, The Last Child, by Austrian-born and Waterford-based artist Gottfried Helnwein, is part of the Waterford Fringe Festival and includes a variety of work placed at strategic locations in the city, such as the Quays, the Clock Tower, City Hall and John Roberts Square. Among the material featured in the images are depictions of children with guns and a child lying down, covered with blood, as well as various shots of children with their eyes closed, as if dead.

catalogue

Some might think that Los Angeles - its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and "veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive." People are surprised, he says, when they discern that he doesn't "seem insane."

Gottfried Helnwein konzipierte und organisierte die erste Musumsausstellung des künstlerischen Werkes von Carl Barks. Von 1994 bis 1997 wurde die Retrospektive in zehn europäischen Museen gezeigt und von über 700 000 Menschen gesehen. - 2007 stellt er die Ausstellung für das Karikaturmuseum Krems neu zusammen, die nun das erste mal in Österreich gezeigt wird.

...Es steht zugleich in einer Reihe von Hommagen an zeitgenössische Künstler, die Müller zwischen 1981 und 1987 zum Teil in Briefform, zum Teil in Gestalt kurzer, dichterischer Essays, schrieb: An Mitko Gottschef, Ginka Tscholakowa, Robert Wilson, Georg Baselitz, Gottfried Helnwein und Bina Bausch.

COVER PAINTING Downtown (I) (2002} by Gottfried Helnwein