ejemplar gratuito
diciembre 2010
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OTTFRIED HELNWEI
Kat Von D Tatoo Artist Los Angeles, CA
MANGO
EDITORIAL
Ansiedad eterna, desolación y sangre, la sociedad ha petrificado la sangre de los niños y enfriado la piel del resto del mundo, Gottfried Helnwein nos sumerge en un mundo no tan diferente al nuestro, oscurece la atmósfera y nos muestra el puro vicio de vernos reflejados en rostros ajenos, el placer de sentirnos rodeados de una vida agonizante tan impropia que, sin saberlo, poco a poco se apodera de nosotros. Así es el arte de Helnwein, controvertido y osado nos pone frente un espejo que matiza toda percepción de la sociedad.
Sleep 26 Gottfried Helnwain, 2009
Pintor, dibujante, muralista, fotógrafo, escultor, artista de performance, Gottfried Helnwein invade toda atmósfera, corroe nuestra realidad y la llena con la suya, en la que, perplejo e impotente ve correr la moribunda vida. Su trabajo ya le ha valido premios como el Theodor-Korner y reconocimientos como el Master Class de la universidad de Artes plásticas en Viena.. “Mi arte no es una respuesta es una pregunta” dice Helnwein, una pregunta que se inmortaliza en sus obras.
Valeria Montiel Fosado Directora creativa
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Creative director: Valeria Montiel Fosado 123143, Visual Information Design Teacher: Sonia Aguirre Advanced Editorial Design Autum, 2010
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Index Gottfried Helnwein 11 Helnwein, Irish and other landscapes 12
The Murmur of the Innocents 5 Gottfried Helnwain, 2009 On the cover: The Dissasters of War 2
Index Kilkeeny steels her walls 14 The man himself 22
The Dissasters of War 6 Gottfried Helnwain, 2007
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GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN
Helnwein, Irish and other landscapes Kelkeeny steels her walls The man himself pikporte
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Peter Murray
HELNWEIN, IRISH AND OTHER LANDSCAPES
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lthough born and educated in post-war Vienna, Gottfried Helnwein is very much an international artist, with exhibitions of his work being held in cities such as San Francisco, Beijing and St. Petersburg. His paintings represent a fusion of historic and comtemporary artistic practices, uniting the Romantic aesthetic of Caspar David Friedrich, the political radicalism of Viennese Actionists and the technical precision of the photorealists of the 1970’s. Although often based on photographs, or inspired by film stills, his painting are built up in fine layers of traditional oil paint and represent a dregree of technical accomplishment rarely seen in European academies. He uses this technical accomplishment and finesse to carry across the strong policical message contained in his artistic objects and instalations. From the early nineteenth century up the Nazi era, Vienna was a city where extraordinary advances in medicine, psychology and political and social theory took place. Helnwein’s art draws inspiration from this city. His portraits of children, vulnerable and damaged, can be read as a commentary on psychoanalysis, where internalised traumas are brought to the surface. Pioneered in Vienna, Freudian psychoanalysis was too easily used to suppress acknowledgement of child abuse. In his conflation of Nazi propaganda with Catholic iconography, Helnwin critiques the denial of history that enveloped his native country in the 1950’s. His paintings of Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse evoke consumer capitalism, the theoretical underpinnings of which were developed in Vienna by Ludwig von Mises and Freidrich Heyek, and transferred, as with so much of the intellectual and artistic life of Vienna, to the United States in the 1930’s. The ruins of post-war Vienna formed the backdrop for Carol Reed’s The Thrid Man, a film which, perhaps not coincidentally, also deals witht he damage caused to children by the moral corruption of the adults in times of conflict. The landscapes, and a cityscape of Vienna, presented in this exhibition draw these different threads together, Helnwein takes the panorama, that heroic nineteenth century attempt to
Te Murmur of the Innocents, detail, 2009
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contain all knowlege in a single image, and suborns the green hills of Ireland to his contemporary take on the imperial gaze. In like fashion he paints large vistas of the Arizona desert, a landscape so different from the lush Irish fields and yet also very connected, through emigration and through images in the films of John Ford, whose Irish sensibility helped shape the mythology of the American West. Many of Helnwein’s paintings are of interiors, dark and claustrophobic.These large panoramic landscapes are a relatively late development in his work and, while they eschew the narrative, they clarly reveal the visionary quality of his art. The exhibition has come about through the dedicated work of curator Dawn Williams and Gottfried and Renata Helnwein. Continuing the Crawford Gallery’s theme of documenting the landscape, internationally renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein will exhibit a number of large-scale (some are of seven metres in lentth), photorealist canvases depicting landscape. Helnwein divides his time between Co Tipperary and Los Angeles and his paintings draw upon the sublimity and drama of these contrasting environments as well as revealing the parallels of Irish and American terrains. Perhaps more recognised as a painters of highly emotive portraits, this exhibition will reveal the influence of lanscape throughtout his career from the early Vienna cityscapes to the present series of Irish lanscapes and recognises the impact in which the German romantic artist Capar David Friedrich (1774-1840) has had on Helnwein’s work. In addition four new smaller scales canvases will also be on view. A full colour cataglogue with an essay by Mic Moroney will accompany the exhibition. Gottfried Helnwein, (born in Vienna in 1948), is a fromidable artist and his work has often been seen as controversial because it functions as moral probes. he contiually reveals affecting issues within his work practice. He has exhibition exensively at key venues throughout the world and is currently preparing for a one-man show at the Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco (Jul 31 2004 - January 16 2005) and will have a retrospective exhibtion at the China National Museum of Fine Arts, Beijing in 2005. As I write, the Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein is wrestling excitedly with his first exhibition in the country which he recently made his home. The work spills out of Butler House, and up onto the festival streets of Kilkenny. These images are huge – in one case as big as six by nine metres, hoisted onto the façade of Kilkenny Castle. Most of the city pictures emerge from a deceptively simple strand of Gottfried’s work, the frank photography of children’s faces. He photographed over ninety children in Kilkenny. Now these kids are immortalised, larger than life in their extreme youth, and dotted around the gable-ends and walls of their native town; there eyes closed in beautiful, breathless meditation. Mounted in a manner which is normally the preserve of billboard advertising, these are quietly awesome images of the city’s youngest inhabitants. Gottfried was so impressed with the photographs he took, that he intends to eventually produce a book of 1,000 faces of Irish children. He wants to codify, in their features and freckles, some
oblique reflection of Irish history and society and experience. It’s a Chritso-like strategy. Next year, Gottfried also plans to show huge 10 metre high pictures of shut-eyed children in the Chinese National Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City – where he will be the first Western artist ever to exhibit there. Everything will have to be negotiated past the Party censors, but who could have a problem with pictures of children; their slumbering faces murmuring telepathically from somewhere far beyond us – even on such a monumental scale? What could be simpler or more inoffensive then a child’s face? However, such images evidently irritated somebody in Köln in 1988, when Gottfried himself funded a public art installation – after he failed to raise sponsorship – to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, November 9th 1938. That was the night that Nazis ran riot across Germany, burning Jewish homes and businesses, setting alight the touchpaper of the Holocaust. Conceptualist Holocaust art-memorials in Germany and Austrian, the City of Köln refused Gottfried permission to exhibit on its property. Gottfried got his hands on a strip of land which belonged to the railways. Facing onto a pedestrian walk-way along a railway bridge, he mounted a long line of children’s faces, powdered white, many with their eyes closed, after the huge word “SKLEKTION” – as though these kids were to be weeded out for concentration camps. Despite CCTV video cameras, somebody – probably a neo-Nazi – came along one night, and painstakingly sliced the throats of every single child-portrait. Anna, 2010
The Murmur of the Innocents 13, 2009
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His place
KILKEENY STEELS HER WALLS
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ilkenny itself has been having a bit of a stir in advance of Gottfried’s huge outdoor montages on the Castle walls which explore the corrupting influence of unfettered power, which once sucked so many ordinary Germans into syste-matic mass murder. Epiphany I - Adoration of the Magi (1996) depicts a beautiful contemporary Madonna and Child, as Himmler’s elite SS officers examine them as through encircling a precious art object or eugenic creation. One officer closely inspects the fingers and genitalia of the Child, while two more appear to check out the Madonna’s attributes from the rear. Another handsome young officer stands in nervous awe of her, as through about to deliver some official proclamation on the little Messiah who, if we look closely, is slightly cross eyed. Gottfried has collaged his Madonna into what was once a photograph of Hitler surrounded by SS men, taken in the last days in the Berlin bunker before the Russians raped the city. The young officer was one Mr. Wünscher who survived the war, and went on to work in Siemens. When Gottfried showed this work in Germany in 1996, Wünscher’s widow demanded that Gottfried remove him from the painting and threatened to sue for defamation, claiming that her late husband was being depicted as a racist. But Gottfried stood firm. “It would have been a very interesting case, and I was ready for it” – but the Wünscher lawyers backed off. Inside Kilkenny Castle courtyard, Gottfried will mount three more huge images of children with closed eyes, again almost in an approximation of sleep or death, seeming to commune with the ancestors of this 11th century fortress. Along the walkway to the Butler House, Epiphany II: Adoration of the Shepherds again depicts a barebreasted Madonna and her blindly pointing Child, this time warmed by the breaths of a stable of smiling SA stormtroopers. The Madonna sits, coy and vulnerable, amidst the smiling menace of doltish young Nazi manhood. Again the Madonna occupies the place once taken by Hitler – but this time, a much younger Hitler from his early years in power, form a daftly staged propaganda image. Hitler, forever anxious not to look ridiculous, later found this photograph embarrassing and burned it. The Presentation of the Temple oscillates between horror, poignance and weird comedy. The beautiful dead – or anaesthetised – girl-child on the table appears as though presented by an array of monstrous professor surgeon types, their faces a litany of sacarification and disfigurement. It’s like a bizarre moral reversal of “euthanasia” programmes under the Nazis.
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Epiphany, 1996
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The Murmur of the Innocents 2, 2009
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The Murmur of the Innocents 14, 2009
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Mario Sorrenty Photography
His life
THE MAN HIMSELF
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Gottfried is a tall, earnestly cheerful character, frequently sporting a radiacalist bandanna for public occasions, but it would be hard not to be impressed by the implacable optimism of he and his wife Renate, and their close globetrotting family of four near-adult kids – plain, genuine, smart, no-nonsense people. Gottfried’s often Poppy images and huge Photorealist canvases have often been proved controversial, because they function as moral probes. Much of his career has been one of protest against the vestiges of Nazism and repressive Catholicism in Austria and Germany, where he insists the two traditions are inextricably linked. Born in 1948, Gottfried grew up in a Vienna which was in profound denial of its historical complicity with the Nazis. Although under Allied control until 1955, Austria was never properly denazified. In school, Gottfried learnt nothing of the mass exultation in Vienna at the annexation of Austria, or the jeering crowds who forced Jews to scrub the streets with water mixed with acid. “In school”, he says “we only heard the one thing over and over, that Austria was Victim Number One of Adolf Hitler, which of course is a joke.”
He attended the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, the art school that rejected Hitler’s portfolio twice – and interestingly, Gottfried studied under the only professor in the Academy whose work was not abstract – Rudolf Hausner, one of the early post war Viennese symbolist painters. In Austria, which he eventually left in 1985, his work was often attacked by far-right elements. One early exhibition of paintings was entirely defaced with stickers reading Entartete Kunst – the Nazi term for Degenerate Art. Another show was confiscated by police on the orders of the local mayor. But as the years rolled on, Gottfried found wealthy backers for this often uncomfortable art.
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A Tear in the Journey,2009
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The Murmur of the Innocents 8,2009
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MINIMAL Interior Design
Tokio . Paris. New York
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THE HISTORY CHANNEL
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Where the Past comes Alive