Su gato siamés trata de robar cámara en la sesión fotográfica: extiende su cuerpo como su dueña, se para donde le indica el fotógrafo, mira al objetivo con sus ojos verdes. O deambula llamando la atención por el luminoso departamento donde computadora, libros y revistas expresan el ordenado desorden de esta actriz de 25 años que obtuvo el premio ACE a la actuación en espectáculo off por su labor en Kleines Helnwein, y una invitación para participar con esa obra en el festival Grec 2001, de Barcelona. ...

Any artist who sites Donald Duck and Jesus Christ as the most important influences in their art must be worth taking a look at.
In the row of pristine gallery fronts in London's Cork street, you cannot miss Gottfried Helnwein's show; it's the one with the gigantic Mickey Mouse staring out at you.
The Robert Sandelson Gallery has given us a stunning show of the infamous, Austrian born artist's recent work. Helnwein is on a mission to find the answers to questions that no-one in Austria would give him; such as why the post-war republic portrayed itself as a victim rather than as one of the first main perpetrators of Nazism. ...

Austrian artist Gottfired Helnwein's powerful and haunting paintings provide a disturbing commentary on Nazism and the Holocaust, regularly provoking outraged reactions from right-wingers in his native land and in Germany. "I was amazed how much pictures could reach into the hearts and minds of people - and how much they would talk to me about it," he told the JC. "For me, art is like a dialogue. My art is not giving answers, it is asking questions." ...

Helnwein, the controversial Austrian artist whose works is currently on show at the Robert Sandelson gallery in London, has always been a difficult personality to pin down.
He chose to exhibit all three "Epiphany" paintings alongside a series of photographs of 19th century stillborn foetuses in an exhibition entitled "Apokalypse". Hung together in a Dominican church in Weinstadt in Austria, the final effect was one of haunting beauty, each child framed magnificently within the high vaulted ceiling of the church. The juxtaposition of these serene yet poignant images of "beings that never were" placed next to paintings that recalled the ideological terrors of the past, created a synthesis of values as politically dynamic as they were aesthetically entrancing. Yet throughout his career as an artist Helnwein has never ceased to use his work as a way to question his immediate surroundings. ...

Kleines Helnwein es la primera obra escrita y dirigida por Rodrigo Malmsten, hasta el momento un joven asistente a talleres de dramaturgia y actuación. Su fuente de inspiración fue la obra del pintor austríaco Gottfried Helnwein, de quien vio una muestra en Europa, hace tres años. El artista plástico trabajó como escenógrafo en algunas puestas del dramaturgo y director Heiner Müller. El personaje central de su espectáculo surge en escena como escapado de una de las obras del artista para exponer “su distanciamiento ante el dolor y su intimidad, presa en una atmósfera infantil”. En el panel central de la escenografía son proyectados algunos cuadros de Helnwein.
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A year or so back, an exhibition called Sensations caused a few upsets, first in London and then in New York. Central to the reaction was a large-scale portrait of a child-killer assembled from, if I remember correctly, the palm prints of children. So far, so bland. The shock element in art has been much talked about in the last five years but art that actually shocks has been thin on the ground during the same period.
Step forward then, Gottfried Helnwein.
By and large, if art is going to shock, it better have something shocking to say,and it's clear that Helnwein has found that. ...

A blonde Madonna, dressed as if she were spending an evening at the opera, presents her child to the watchful eyes of Nazi SS Guards, One officer looks as if he were studying the child's genitals, perhaps to see whether he has been circumcised. Dark hair parted severely to one side and fleshy baby cheeks lending a slight and comical hangdog expression, the young child presents something of an eerie resemblance to the Führer. ...

But as with his repressive Roman Catholic upbringing, it seems that Helnwein, born in 1948, will never escape the Nazi theme (in fact, he sees the two traditions as inextricably linked). Spurred into action by an interview in an Austrian tabloid in which the country's top court psychiatrist, Dr Heinrich Gross, admitted killing children at Vienna's Am Spiegelgrund Paediatric Unit during the war by poisoning their food, Helnwein painted Life not Worth Living - a watercolour of a little girl "asleep" on the table, her head in her plate. The painting sparked a nationwide debate that finally led to Gross appearing before a Vienna court in March. The judge ruled Gross was mentally unfit to be tried.
Outside the courtroom I met relatives of his alleged child victims, bearing photographs of them: their bellies distended from drug experimentation, their skulls clamped in head-measuring instruments. The brains of more than 400 of them ended up pickled in jars in the basement of the hospital where Gross experimented on them. Helnwein's first solo show in the UK consists largely of frail and tender formaldehyde-yellow or x-ray-blue images of pre-natal babies and children, reflecting the horror of the Nazi euthanasia programme, but brought close to the 21st century by the freshness of the Gross story. The huge portraits have been reworked from deformed teratological images from Austria's Anatomical Museum. ...

Kate Connolly meets Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian who is still confronting his country's Nazi past. It could have been worse. At least he doesn't look like his self-portraits, in which bandages swathe his head, bent forks pull his mouth into a mocking smile and blood drenches his torso. Helnwein, 52, is a master of the scandalous and the art of shocking. The artist Robert Crumb once said of him: "Helnwein is a very fine artist and one sick motherfucker." "You can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the strong and powerful to slide and totter - anything, actually, if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means." ...

Helnwein, who grew up in Austria just after the Second World War had, like many others of his generation living in Germany or Austria, found it hard to come to terms with the Nazi past. As with fellow German and Austrian artists Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Hermann Nitsch, there is a sense of being plagued by history in his work, even though he says that art should never be about ideology - "I don't want to teach and explain." ...