Gottfried Helnwein
Reality and Fiction
ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
25 October 2023 – 11 February 2024
To mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the artist Gottfried Helnwein, who was born in Vienna in 1948, the ALBERTINA presents a comprehensive exhibition of his output of the past three decades. Every single work of his is an accusation of cruelty and ruthlessness, of the horrors of fascism.
Gottfried Helnwein’s work stands out for its uncompromising realism, which denounces social ills and focuses on the innocent, defenseless child. Children embody psychological and social fears, as well as the pain inflicted upon them by abuse, power, and violence.
The artist’s hyperrealist images, which are always based on photographic models, are “bigger than life” while impressing us with their technical perfection. Although the works are perceived as real, their oversized dimensions and the use of monochromy contradict reality; Gottfried Helnwein moves away from the original impression of reality his pictures pretend to convey, seeking to create a symbolic image. In his pictorial cosmos, the artist combines motifs from diametrically opposed worlds: manga characters and war photography, Donald Duck and Adolf Hitler, the Virgin Mary and Nazi henchmen.
In the series “The Disasters of War,” which Gottfried Helnwein has worked on since 2007, he integrates manga-inspired figures of girls into disaster scenarios. Through this bizarre fusion of manga elements with real catastrophes, the artist highlights the absurdity of these incidents. Although the manga style is omnipresent in today’s popular culture, Helnwein initially found it alien and disturbing. For him, this style symbolizes an artificial childishness that does not seem human, but cold and synthetic.
Occasionally, girls in military uniforms or carrying weapons in their hands appear in Gottfried Helnwein’s pictures, sometimes with bandages or bloody wounds. The scenes recall child soldiers or teenage shooters running amok in the United States. The artist thus addresses the susceptibility of children to all forms of manipulation and how they are abused ideologically. The cartoon characters in his pictures seem like perfidiously imagined “whisperers” and at the same time emphasize the madness of these delusions that have become images. Mickey Mouse, monstrous and with bared teeth, reveals a latent dark side and unmasks the evil that hides behind its otherwise friendly façade. Approaching a child’s bed, the eerie yellow birdman with his long pointed beak likewise seems to have emerged from a nightmare.
Gottfried Helnwein ties in with the world of children, where imaginary things and fantasy constructs have the same right to exist as real things: the monster under the bed becomes a real danger, the teddy bear feels authentic emotions, and the closet door becomes the entrance to an alien realm. But here in the picture, nothing springs from a child’s blossoming imagination; on the contrary, Gottfried Helmwein blurs the line between reality and nightmare to illustrate that monsters do exist.
Gottfried Helnwein has translated his themes into a wide variety of techniques and media: from his early watercolors and drawings, his actions and their photographic documentation, to paintings, stage sets for theater productions, and installations in public spaces. Oftentimes the genres merge, or elements that were originally created in one context are used in another. Gottfried Helnwein thus sees himself primarily as a conceptual artist. In the 1980s, at the time of his move to Germany, the artist realized that format had come to play a role in his art. He concluded that his works would have to become larger if they were to compete for attention with the flood of images, advertisements, posters, and billboards. With this caesura in his oeuvre, his portraits of children became monumental, sometimes covering entire façades of buildings. Gottfried Helnwein lends children an extraordinary presence that conveys the importance and urgency of his themes. In their larger-than-life size and hyperrealist mode of representation, and with the artist reproducing every detail with incredible accuracy, the figures come up to an exaggeration of reality that disturbs and simply overwhelms us.
Gottfried Helnwein’s work seems to impress us just because of this very tension between realism and the transcendence of the artistic object. The symbolic figures and motifs of violence take over in our minds, for what we see may well be a face smeared with blood, but this face is neither bleeding nor contorted with pain.
Curator: Elsy Lahner
Editor: Elsy Lahner, Klaus Albrecht Schröder
Published by Hirmer Verlag, 2023
Available in German and in English
152 pages, 28,5 x 24,5 cm, Hardcover
ISBN: 9783777442082
Accompanying the exhibition a 152 pages comprehensive catalogue is published containing texts by Elsy Lahner and Klaus Speidel, as well as quotes by the artist himself.
ALBERTINA Museum
Albertinaplatz 1 - 1010 Vienna
