NEWSHelnwein

Regelmäßig zeichnet das Europäische Kulturforum Künstler aus, die in ihren Genres eine besondere Stellung einnehmen. In der Sparte bildende Kunst war das heuer Helnwein.

Due to the COVID-19 crisis the world premiere of PASSION could not take place at the PalmKlang Festival. In these challenging times we were inspired by a main message of PASSION: The hope for resurrection. Therefore we joined forces with other art forms and developed a new concept for the premiere; we exchanged the stage for a museum and the audience for a camera. On the 3rd and 4th of July 2020 we spent the night at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Surrounded by and inspired by the art of Gottfried Helnwein, we brought PASSION to life. The result is this film, a resurrection of our artistic beliefs and hopes.

The most complete monograph realized about the Austrian painter, photographer, filmmaker, performer and set designer, born in Vienna in 1948. The works of Helnwein show the bare truth where society instead hides and removes. What emerges by leafing through the pages of this monograph is the obsession that accompanies the artistic career of this notable Austrian artist, marked by the wish to breakdown the rhetoric of war, the constructions of self-absolution, the mystifications of religious institutions in whose pitfalls men periodically fall as if they had not committed the same mistake over and over again.