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The internationally renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein (born October 8, 1948 in Vienna) is an Austrian-Irish fine artist, painter, photographer, installation and performance artist. He is a prominent artist in in a variety of artistic fields. I admire him for he is a phenomenon in a field of hyper-realistic painting. Gottfried Helnwein is without doubt beyond all praise.


The art of Gottfried Helnwein cannot be properly considered without surveying the terrain of modern and contemporary art from which it developed. To understand Helnwein is not just to see what movements and artists he embraced and was influenced by, but also what he rejected.
Viennese-born Helnwein is part of a tradition going back to the 18th century, to which Messerschmidt's grimacing sculptures belong. One sees, too, the common ground of his works with those of Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Günter Brus, three other Viennese, who display their own bodies in the frame of reference of injury, pain, and death. One can also see this fascination for body language goes back to the expressive gesture in the work of Egon Schiele.


Gottfried Helnwein is an intelligent individual whose art is influenced, but not overwhelmed, by his awareness of history, culture, and politics.

Helnwein expanded his creative imagination into the areas he is best known for today. The art of drawing and painting was and is the bedrock of his art. However, Helnwein did not want to be confined or categorised and felt free also to involve himself in photography. Further, he wanted to take his art out into the streets, to confront the world with his images and ideas. This form of art, now generally referred to as performance art, was called "Aktions." In America, in the early sixties, it was called "Happenings," but their true origin goes back to the early days of the Dada movement in Switzerland, France, and Germany.


A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject matter was the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it included self-portraits, was dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within.




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