ARTISTHelnwein

The film is awarded the Adolf Grimme Prize and in the same year wins the Eduard Rhein Prize and the Golden Kader of the city of Vienna for outstanding camera work.

Group show

Gottfried and Renate Helnwein were amongst the few people that Marlene invited to her home in Paris, and stayed in close contact with until the end of her life

"Gottfried Helnwein: Called the 'Razor Blade Rembrandt' or 'the Boris Karloff of Art', Helnwein is the man most Austrians love to hate. He schocks people. His paintings are scenes from every-day life, highly realistic, but there's a sharp, morbid streak in many of them. Children with razors, faces under extreme stress or in fear or in pain. Intensly human, often savage, but always stunning. I found him to be a sensitive, warm human being..."

But the painting is already part of a collection in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.

The exhibition is seen by more than a hundred thousand people

- the Austrian art-collector and patron Hans Dichand finances a campaign with large bill- boards of Helnwein's artwork throughout Austria against the destruction of the last great riverside meadowland woods in Europe by the Austrian power-station company Donau- kraftwerke AG.

Helnwein demands no tests and no age-restrictions as pre-requisites for his students. He wants the freedom to accept anybody, including children. The college rejectes this demand as being against university regulations and Helnwein declines the offer

1982, auf ihrer zweiten US-Tour, mit Iron Maiden als Support Act, promoten die SCORPIONS als Headliner ihre bahnbrechende LP "Blackout", das Album mit dem spektakulären Helnwein-Cover. Die Single "No One Like You" und die "Blackout"- LP erreichen die Top Ten in den USA. Es gilt als das beste Hard Rock Album des Jahres und wird mit Platin ausgezeichnet.

The self-portrait as a screaming blinded man is used for this cover story and later for the cover of the Scorpions' LP "Blackout".

He further accuses Elvis' physician of murder and criticizes the education system, referring to the high number of student-suicides. Helnwein calls upon students to simply stay away from school. The director of Austrian Radio (ORF) is appalled and cancels the show

Begin of the friendship with Wolfgang Bauer

R. Höpfinger and E. Regnier hand out sweets and toys bearing Helnwein pictures of wounded children to passers-by in Zürich.

Spurred into action by an interview in the Austrian newspaper "Kurier" in which the country's top court psychiatrist, Dr Heinrich Gross, admits killing children at Vienna's "Am Spiegelgrund" Pediatric Unit during the war by poisoning their food, Helnwein paints "Life not Worth Living" - a watercolour of a little girl "asleep" on the table, her head in her plate. The painting gets published in Austrias leading newsmagazine Profil and sparkes a nationwide debate that finally leads to Gross' appearing before a Vienna court . The judge rules Gross is mentally unfit to be tried.

"Unser Entenbischof" (Our Duck-Bishop), "Zwei amerikanische Ärzte behelligen eine Patientin" (Two American Doctors teasing a Patient), "Mulattin Erika in ihrem Haus" (Mulato-girl Erika in her House),"Das Wannenwunder von Watras" (The Bathtub Wonder of Watras), "Metallippe zum Lächeln" (Metal Lip for Smiling), "Das Grubenunglück" (Mine Disaster), "Korrekturspange" (Corrective Brace), "Assistent Assmann" (Assistant Assmann), "Hilfe für Mann ohne Kinn" (Help for Man with no Chin).

"Suicide in Austria" (Selbstmord in Österreich), showing a little girl slashing her wrists. - many readers are outraged and cancel their subscriptions.

A Helnwein exhibition in the Gallery of the "House of the Press" in Vienna, headquarters of Austrias biggest newspapers, is discontinued after five days because of strong protests by visitors and employees and finally strike threats by the workers council

With few fellow students and several activists, Helnwein stages a rebellion at the Akademy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The trigger was the refusal of the professors to allow student representatives a say in the entrance examinations. The event is carefully planned and choreographed by Helnwein. Professors are locked in, doors are set a blaze, the building is filled with smoke, paint splattered on the walls, windows smashed and serious damage is done. Panic breakes out and Riot police moves in. The Austrian media reported on the “student revolt at the Academy of Fine Arts". The next day Helnwein and his colleagues get picked up by custodians of the university and charged. Hertha Firnberg, Austrian minister of art and science, declares their action to be political and all investigations and criminal proceedings are dropped.

In his essay "The Divided Self", art-historian Peter Gorsen states: "As shown by his many actions with children in public, the group portrait with children has become a permanent subject for Helnwein. His commitment to the rights of children has nothing to do with "infantomania", as manifested in a socially isolated "children's culture", in a commercialized "children's media", in the child as a pedagogical subject, and in the ideological transfiguration of one's own childhood. Helnwein must also be set apart from Viennese Actionism as he does not reduce the child's body to mere aesthetic material (as in the "material actions" of Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, and Otto Muehl), but instead endows it with a symbolic function in representing defenceless, sacrificed man. The sexualistic concept of the child in (Freud-influenced) "Viennese Actionism" is countered by the moralist and utopian Helnwein with the child as a sexless salvation figure. The tendency to a patriarchal transfiguration and idealization of an innocent, sacrificing child-man embracing children and artists as the sole creative interest group is the main feature distinguishing Helnwein's world of pictures from the pan-sexualism and libido anarchy of the Vienna action group of old."

Intensive research into the various forms of trivial aesthetics such as comics, advertising, and film; puts this experience into his work. Watercolor: "Unkeusches Kind" (Unchaste Child), "Peinlich" (Embarrassing), "Gemeines Kind" (Mean Child), "Der Eingriff" (Intrusion). First oil paintings: "Mutter, Du hier?" (Mother, Is It You?); "Führer, wir danken Dir!" (Führer, We Thank You!).

Helnwein cuts his face and hands with razor blades, etching- and wood-engraving tools. First bandaging happenings.

("Höhere Bundes-Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, Wien" )

Kindergarten with nuns, becomes altar boy, goes to school with the "School-brothers"...

And Helnwein has his Damascus experience: "Opening my first Donald Duck comic book felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who has been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I squinted cautiously because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the dazzling, bright sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin into my dusty lungs. I was back home again, in 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. And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life - a man who, as the Austrian poet H.C. Artmann put it, is the only person today that has something worthwhile saying: Donald Duck."