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exhibition-catalogue
Albertina, Wien - 10. 10. 2000 - 18. 10. 2000
Galerie Suppan, Wien - 23.10. - 25.11. 2000
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The Book Bukowski in Pictures is the first pictorial biography of cult writer, Charles Bukowski. The writer's extraordinary private and public life is illustrated with hundreds of photographs, most published for the first time. Extracts from Bukowski's poetry and prose are sprinkled throughout, together with drawings, cartoons, manuscripts, rare broadsides and personal letters. It features powerful new portraits of Bukowski by leading photographers such as Gottfried Helnwein and Tony Lane, former art director of Rolling Stone, as well as work by R.Crumb. All photographs have detailed captions by biographer Howard Sounes who has also written a powerful introductory text with new revelations gleaned from Bukowski's recently declassified FBI file. The end result is a fascinating life in pictures that will be essential for all Bukowski fans. ...

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(excerpt) Other works in the exhibition present the dark side of cartoon characters. The prevailing narrative structure of many cartoons is a cycle of one's character's unrelenting attacks on another. Yet the violence of these scenarios is subverted and humor achieved by the lack of any permanent injury to the victim and the gleeful nonchalance of the adversary even during the most aggressive assault. Static representations of wounded or menacing cartoon characters can expose the violence and eliminate the humorous punch line. In Gottfried Helnwein's painting Mickey (plate 24), Mickey Mouse's physical features, which usually contribute to his appeal become a thin veneer of looming attack. Blown up to a monster scale and rendered in an austere gray palette, Mickey's smile is deceptive. ...

In 'The Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous.
Much of the work has the quality of childhood nightmares. In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child's world are rent with something untoward.
For children, not understanding what really to be afraid of, these dreams portend some pain and disturbance lurking into the landscape.
Perhaps nothing in the exhibition exemplifies this better than Gottfried Helnwein's 'Mickey'.
His portrait of Disney's favotite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer.
This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed. Helnwein's Mickey is painted in shades of gray, as if pictured on an old black-and-white TV set. We are meant to be transported to the flickering edges of our own childhood memories in a time imaginably more blameless, crime-less and guiltless.
But Mickey's terrifying demeanor hints of things to come. ... ...

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 ...

Relié - 424 pages (26 août 1999)
Könemann; (Beaux Arts) ; ISBN : 3829014481 ...

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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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