With ironic images of toys and cartoon figures, a number of contemporary painters, photographers and sculptors take incisive aim at the emotional underbelly of childhood in The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from September 1, 2000, through January 2, 2001. Explaining how these representations question deeply rooted social mores, this exhibition includes over 30 playful and wicked works-drawn from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan-by such contemporary artists as Gottfried Helnwein, David Levinthal, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Laurie Simmons and Hung Tung-lu. As Kent Logan states, "Of the themes in our collection this exhibition will explore what I like to call 'Children's Hour.'" ...

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The 24-hour city is already a reality for art-lover Lou Reed.
Reed was dining with a friend - the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein - on Sunday night, when he decided he wanted to see Helnwein's new show at the Robert Sandelson Gallery.
"I had just taken to my bed when I got a phone call from Gottfried", says Sandelson. "But I'm an old fan of Lou Reed so I went as I was and opened up at midnight." For nearly an hour, Sandelson stood in his nightwear and "yawned away while they analysed the pictures in detail". ...

Catalogue:
Helnwein
Robert Sandelson Gallery. London
Text by Robert Flynn Johnson,
Curator in Charge,
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco ...

This made perfect sense, I thought, considering the visuals attached to their recent album Sehnsucht: portraits of the band by Gottfried Helnwein, the brilliant German artist whose gauze-wrapped and fork-embellished self-portrait had been an album cover for the Scorpions -- you know the one I'm talking about?
Helnwein had photographed the Rammstein faces after mangling and compromising them with arcane medical apparatus; and here I was, with my back mangled and compromised, being photographed by arcane medical apparatus! How very synchronistic it all was!
Why, Helnwein was probably out there right now, conducting the band in their concerted hammerstrikes, perhaps even forming a mini mosh pit with my wife or discussing the finer points of arcane medical apparatus-based face-mangling with the MRI tech! Of course! And there were streamers, too! Multicolored streamers that descended from the antiseptic rafters and twisted and shimmered like silken snakes dancing in time to the music ... ...

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These paintings are about America, I guess from a very European point of view.
They're based on photographs, mainly newspaper photographs, of the Fifties and Sixties from archives in New York and L.A. Most people in these pictures are real people, caught in some long forgotten, petty events.
I rearranged the scenes, introduced new characters, and created new relationships and contexts. And then I painted them in black and blue.
That's how I remember America back then in the early Fifties in Vienna, where I was born. The big war had ended a few years ago, but the city still seemed undecided as to whether this was the end of the world or if life should go on.
It was a strange, sad and surreal world. The streets were empty, the houses dark - many of them in ruins from the bombings.
The few people I saw seemed ugly, clumsy, and depressed.
I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard anybody sing. It was a world without sound and colour. Everything moved in slow motion, like slime. We had no phones, no television, no cars, no music, no pictures, except the paintings of tortured people in the Roman Catholic church which made a deep impression on me, haunting me in the sleepless nights of my childhood limbo.
And then, without any warning, suddenly there was America.
When I saw the first picture of Elvis I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.
That was the beginning of the never-ending flood of American images that suddenly came over us and started to penetrate and transform everything. ...

But stand all this beside an Antony Gormley cage figure (White Cube) or the giant paintings of stillborn babies by Gottfried Helnwein, an artist revered in Germany and Austria (Robert Sandelson). ...

-La versatilità sperimentale di Helnwein sfugge ad ogni classificazione . spesso ci si dimentica anche del suo coinvolgimento attivo nell'antipsichiatria e contro l'autoritarismo a favore del disarmo e di una maggiore presa di coscienza dei problemi ecologici . Le opere più recenti di Helnwein lo vedono particolarmente attento nel rilevare la sensazione di crisi permanente a livello emozionale , il suo lavoro è carico di quasi tutte le manifestazioni della violenza , storiche e attuali . Il doppio ruolo dell'artista , quale vittima e carnefice , mandante ed esecutore e molte altre metamorfosi ; impersona e rappresenta le forze sociali antagoniste sul palcoscenico della propia coscienza . Con Helnwein e con le generazioni dei trentenni di oggi il sentimento romantico dell'avanguardia ha raggiunto una tensione radicale : l'artista come mancato , deluso avversario del borghese , diventa un martire di una rivoluzione che non ha raggiunto l'emancipazione dell'individuo . Perciò il ritorno del romanticismo porta anche con Helnwein a forzare uno dei suoi aspetti : la stilizzazione sotto forma di autoritratto di una protesta introversa fino al martirio , che storicamente è legato in modo contraddittorio all'opposizione sociale , alla ribellione , all'utopia .
teresa gabanacl@tin.it
il 15/01/00 alle 20:38:19 ...

Gottfried Helnwein ...

DAMANTHAL: ENTRE HELNWEIN Y LA CIENCIA
por Julia Elena Sagaseta

La génesis de El experimento Damanthal parte del universo plástico, porque el director, Javier Margulis, ofrece a los intérpretes un mundo imaginario, el de Helnwein, un artísta austríaco contemporáneo que comienza a exponer en los años 70 y está ligado, al comienzo de su carrera, al Accionismo Vienés. Helnwein es un artista polifacético que también escapa de los géneros (su inicial relación con un grupo relacionado con la neovanguardia ya anuncia esa actitud posterior) y pasa por etapas muy variadas: del hiperrealismo a la abstracción, la fotografía, las Acciones (en el sentido de Beuys), relaciones con el pop, con el diseño, con el comic. Creo que lo más destacado es la borradura de fronteras entre pintura y fotografía, desterritorializando ambas. Es, también como Beuys, un artista comprometido con su tiempo del que muestra la veta más terrible. Sus autorretratos forman series en técnicas diferentes, pero conforman un imaginario reiterado: la cabeza o el rostro vendados, con sangre, o bien la boca o los ojos con instrumentos quirúgicos. Hay también series de niños vendados, figuras con horribles cicatrices y una instalación terrible que realizó en Colonia en recuerdo de la Noche de los Cristales: enormes retratos de niños tristes que ocupaban varias calles entre el Museo Ludwig y la Catedral. Un arte nada complaciente y al mismo tiempo de una gran perfección técnica y una notable calidad plástica. ...

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DIETRO IL LORO SUCCESSO, DAL LATO DI BERLINO EST , UN PRODUTTORE DI SUCCESSO CHE SI CHIAMA JACOB HELLNER , GLI ANNI OTTANTA , LA CULTURA CYBERPUNK E UN ARTISTA PAZZO, GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN. ...

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Kennt Gucci Gottfried Helnwein?
Wie Klonen des Wiener Konzeptkünstlers spazierten die Models Sonntag Abend in Mailand für das Florentiner Modehaus über den Laufsteg. ...

group show ...

Historian Peter Selz has compared Gottfried Helnwein's tortured, screaming, and bandaged self-portraits to Messerschmidt's sculptural self-portraits,
but the artist has said, " The reason why I took up the subject of self-portraits and why I have put myself on stage was to function as a kind of representative.
There is nothing autobiographical, no therapy, and it says nothing about me personally.
I am always available as a model." ... ...

Der Argentinier Rodrigo M. Malmsten hat, inspiriert durch die Bilder Gottfried Helnweins, das Theaterstück "KLEINES HELNWEIN" geschrieben. Es wurde 2000 in Buenos Aires uraufgeführt TITULO DE LA OBRA: KLEINES HELNWEIN Es una Coproduccion con el Teatro General San Martin ...

Die Ausstellung präsentiert vierzig ausgewählte Statements großer Photographen des 20.Jahrhunderts:
von Cartier-Bresson, Lebeck, Chargesheimer bis zu Klauke und Helnwein wird jeweils eine bedeutende künstlerische Position gezeigt.
Die Ausstellung konzentriert sich nicht auf das Einzelbild, sondern komponiert ganze Werkgruppen zu großformatigen Tableaus und unterstreicht so den "journalistischen Aspekt" in der Photographie dieses Jahrhunderts.
Einen Abschluß findet dieser Jahrhundertrückblick in drei künstlerischen Positionen, die in sehr persönlicher Weise Stellung zur gesellschaftlichen Situation beziehen:
Jürgen Klaukes "Self Performance" (1972/73), Philip Pococks Berliner Szenen (1982)
sowie Gottfried Helnweins "Poems" (1998). ...

Früher, zu den Zeiten von Heinrich Böll und Christa Wolf, von Günther Grass und Wolf Biermann, war es vor allem die Politik, die sich mit den Künstlern anlegte. Das ist lange her. Heute sind es die politischen Feuilletonisten, die als Generäle und Generalisten Streit suchen. Die Reihe der großen Namen ist lang, die in den letzten Jahren in Verdacht und Verruf gerieten. Botho Strauß, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Walser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gottfried Helnwein, Peter Handke - ihnen allen wurde "gefährliches Denken", Abdriften in "Untiefen" oder "Fischen im Trüben" vorgeworfen, wenn man sie nicht gleich verdächtigte, "faschistoid" zu denken, zu malen oder zu schreiben. ...