It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition:
to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.
Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition. ...

Wie hält ein freundlicher Mensch wie Helnwein es aus, seine exzellente - Malerei zum Spiegel der Schrecken des Jahrhunderts zu machen?
Oder hält er es einfach nicht aus, das nicht zu tun? Reflektiert sein Spiegel nur die Jahrhunderthaltung, LIEBER EIN SCHRECKEN OHNE ENDE ALS EIN ENDE MIT SCHRECKEN, die aus der Überbewertung des Todes kommt, Folge seiner Tabuierung durch Statistik. Perseus, der die Gorgo im Spiegel guillotiniert, und wenn der Kopf fällt, ist es der eigene.
Wie viel Köpfe hat ein Mensch / Mann in unserem Zeitalter der Spiegel? ...

A story by Stephen King. An American schoolboy, twelve or thirteen years old, fascinated in his small-town boredom by documents on the German concentration camps - the way his classmates are by Superman - the formula of his fascination: THEY JUST DID THOSE THINGS...
How does a friendly person like Helnwein stand making his - excellent - painting into a mirror of the terrors of this century? Or is it that he can't stand not doing it? Does his mirror just reflect the attitude of the century? TERROR WITHOUT END IS BETTER THAN AN ENDING IN TERROR. It comes from the over-evaluation of death, a consequence of "statistics" making it taboo. Perseus guillotines the Gorgon in the mirror -, and when the head falls, it is his own.
How many heads does a person/man have in our age of mirrors? ...

Helnwein - A Concept Artist before the Turn of the Millennium. Is it sheer coincidence that Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian artist, created a portrait of both the German and the American? Coincidence, that he captured Warhol as a disturbing spectre on photograph, but painted Beuys? And that he then photographed the painted portrait of Beuys in the hands of Arno Breker, Adolf Hitler's favourite sculptor? There are weighty reasons for considering Helnwein the legitimate heir to Beuys and Warhol. ...

Artist of inner Turmoil.
Gottfried Helnwein's works from the 1980's are represented by the self-portraits in his "Black Mirror" series. However, these works reach far beyond the boundaries of the ordinary self-portrait.
They reflect the inner wants and desperation which lies within the viewer's own self.
Helnwein points out the new form of the modern self-portrait which involves the creator and viewer alike. ...

"In memory of the children of Europe who have to die of cold and hunger this Xmas", was written on the draft of a poster in the winter of 1945 by the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka who emigrated to London. He had 5000 copies printed at his own cost and posted in underground stations.
In late autumn 1988 the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, who emigrated to the Rhineland, mounted a series of five meter high photo prints with children's faces along a one hundred meter long wall between the cathedral of Cologne and the Museum Ludwig. He called the work Selection (Ninth November Night). It is a work of monstrous expression and painful effect. His title recalls the anniversary of the so-called Reichskristallnacht, through which Helnwein gives the children's portraits their almost overwhelmingly harrowing effect.
As we were preparing his exhibition for the Lentos Art Museum together with Gottfried Helnwein, I was researching at the same time for a different project about Kokoschka. The story of the London posters was new to me. Unintentionally and unexpectedly the two artist lives blended into one another for a brief poignant moment. With a tremendous creative effort, ability to communicate, organizational experience, implementation energy and financial resources, both artists devoted themselves on a specific occasion to an appeal: Remember! ...

In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own. ...

I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling of Gottfried Helnwein's "Kindskopf" in the Russian Museum. And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions, seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental space of the museum's "Concrete Hall", originally intended for the demonstration of gigantic sculptural compositions. I realised that I was looking at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new point of view. ...

Gleichzeitig mit den ab 1969 gemalten Bildnissen verletzter und mißhandelter Kinder wird um 1971/72 das bandagierte Kind als die neben dem Künstler wichtigste und mit ihm verbündete Märtyrerfigur in der Aktion dargestellt. Es verkörpert den unschuldigen, wehrlosen, der Gewalt ausgelieferten, geopferten Menschen. Als unschuldigem "Lichtkind", dessen Verletzungen an Kopf und Händen Lichtstrahlen wie selbstleuchtende Stigmen aussenden, wird him die gleiche Heroisierung zur Dulder- und Erlöserfigur wie dem Künstler zuteil. In einer Fotosequenz von 1972 wird diese Lichtmystik auf das Selbstbildnis des Märtyrer-Künstlers ausdrücklich übertragen. Die Wundmale und Knebelungen des Gesichtes verwandeln sich in den mit einer Grattage-Technik bearbeiteten Grimassenfotos zu weiß strahlenden Leuchtspuren.
Das Gruppenbildnis mit Kindern wird Helnwein, wie auch seine zahlreichen Aktionen mit Kindern in der Öffentlichkeit zeigen, künftig nicht mehr loslassen. Sein Eintreten für die Rechte des Kindes grenzt sich ab von jeder Kindertümelei, die in einer gesellschaftlich ausgegrenzten "Kinderkultur", den kommerzialisierten "Kindermedien", in Kind als pädagogischem Objekt und in der ideologischen Verklärung der eigenen Kindheit durch die Erwachsenen ihren Ausdruck findet.
Abgrenzbar ist Helnwein auch vom Wiener Aktionismus, wenn er den Körper des Kindes nicht zum ästhetischen Material (wie in den "Materialaktionen" von Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch und Otto Muehl) nivelliert, sondern ihm eine symbolische Stellvertreterfunktion für den wehrlosen, geopferten Menschen verleiht. Dem sexualistischen Verständnis des Kindes im (Freud rezipierenden) "Wiener Aktionismus" setzt der Moralist und Weltverbesserer Helnwein die geschlechtslose Heilsgestalt des Kindes entgegen.
Die Tendenz zur patriarchalen Verklärung und Idealisierung eines unschuldigen, opferbereiten Kindmenschen, der Kinder und Künstler als einzige kreative Interessengemeinschaft umfaßt, während der weibliche Mensch ausgescholossen bleibt und in den Geltungsbereich der übrigen ästhetischen Objekte fällt, unterscheidet Helnweins Bildwelt wesentlich von Pansexualismus und Triebanarchismus der einstigen Wiener Aktionsgruppe. Das idyllische Gruppenbild des Künstlers als Schmerzensmann mit malträtierten Kindern hat auch einen lebensgeschichtlichen, autobiographischen Aspekt, seitdem die eigenen aufwachsenden Kinder Cyril, Mercedes und Ali zu Modellen der Live- und Fotoaktionen avanciert sind. ...

Je est un autre, RIMBAUD.
Helnwein compared the "quietly theatrical" ecstatic attitude of his self-portrait with the heroic pose of the figure of the suffering figure of Sebastian and generalizes both to the stigma of the artist in the 20th century, making him a kind of saviour figure. In addition, its poetic title sets the viewer onto the right track. The visual montage of the modern artist as Man of Sorrows with Friedrich's landscape painting projects the dashed hopes of the romantic rebellion into the present, to the protest thinking of modernity, which has become introverted and masochistic, and its crossing of aesthetic boundaries. Is romanticism making a comeback? No; actually, it had never left modernity. But its rebellion is confining and introverting itself in the "body metaphysics" of contemporary artists to its own flesh and blood. ...