Renowned Austrian-born artist, Gottfried Helnwein has committed himself and his art to reminding the world of the Holocaust. His exhibit, Ninth November Night, consists of 20 large panels of children's portraits displayed in commemoration of Kristallnacht. "Ninth November Night" was originally displayed in 1988 in Cologne, Germany. Days into the exhibit, the paintings were vandalized by neo-Nazis.
This exhibit will have its American premiere in Philadelphia in November, 2008 ...

An alternative title to “Angels Sleeping” for this exhibition could be “All Hail to the Wounded Child,” as many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwien’s works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us, not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs and disturbances.
If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition, it would be a long, endless scream. ...

The exhibition Angels Sleeping is a thematic cross-section, predominantly of the painting work of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein (born in Vienna in 1948). The artist’s merciless approach to the residues of the Nazi past of his country is a further theme, developed in monochrome, hyperrealistic painting. The central and still extremely relevant theme of Helnwein’s work however is das "malträtierte Kind", the child exposed to suffering. The author engages with this theme in various positions from his early works from the 1970s up to the present day. His collection of works on this theme is given the largest space. Violence committed against children, in contrast with their passive exposure, distressed astonishment and impossibility of defending themselves against the world of adults.. ...

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. "Epiphany I (Adoration of a Magi)," a 1996 painting, renders the infant - interpreted both as Hitler and Christ - as being visited by not three men but five, in S.S. uniforms. 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."
The visceral reactions, he's come to realize, have as much to do with what's already in the viewers head as what he's created. "It's not my piece of canvas with tiny fractions of pigment," he explains. "The . . . art . . . has the potential of putting that finger on the spot, and it can trigger something that you'd rather not like to look at. But it's [already] in your own mind. That's what I think art can do." ...

Without doubt I was under the spell of Gottfried Helnwein, the final speaker of the excellent DAM Contemporaries artist lecture series (December 13th, 2007). His incantation began before I had even heard him speak, after seeing his twisted photorealistic infant Hitler-Christ child and mother Mary interrogated by the Nazi SS (1996 "Epiphany, Adoration of the Magi," part of the Radar show earlier this year at the DAM.) The artist himself noted that "hardly any other painting created so much emotional response" as Epiphany I (he created 2 other works in the series). ...

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Konsequent und virtuos. Technische Meisterschaft und auch die Konsequenz einer packenden sozialkritischen Thematik offenbaren sich in dieser Ausstellung: Gewalt, Schmerz, Verletzung werden dargestellt. Den Körper ebenso wie die Psyche betreffend. Helnwein dokumentiert hier in Linz einen künstlerischen Reifegrad, der eine weitere Steigerung kaum vorstellbar macht. Seine Eingriffe sind von einer schmerzhaften Unmittelbarkeit, deren emotionale Energie weit über die großen Bildformate hinaus den Raum und sein Publikum ergreift. (Irene Judmayer - Oberösterreichische Nachrichten) ...