Like Wong from Asia and Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. School of Art and Art History, University of DenverĪn exhibition of works from the Denver Art Museum’s fractional and promised gift of contemporary art from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes.' Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 17. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.īut the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. 'Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. 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!Ĭalifornia Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - Summary of reviews and texts. Unintentionally and unexpectedly the two artist lives blended into one another for a brief poignant moment. The story of the London posters was new to me. 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. His title recalls the anniversary of the so-called Reichskristallnacht, through which Helnwein gives the children's portraits their almost overwhelmingly harrowing effect. It is a work of monstrous expression and painful effect.
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He called the work Selection (Ninth November Night).
MALEVICH METAIMAGE SERIES
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 had 5000 copies printed at his own cost and posted in underground stations. "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.
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