Gottfried Helnwein

Original canvas. The work appears in excellent overall condition. No retouching under ultraviolet light. Unframed.
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Gottfried Helnwein's paintings shock, awe, attract and repel; what is not in question is their emotional impact, and this is the driving force of Helnwein's work. Dismissive of art and theories that can be only understood from an elitist viewpoint, Helnwein's paintings are to be experienced directly. 'Real art is intense, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Art is not logic, and if you want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something spiritual that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul' (Interview with Gottfried Helnwein, Brendan Maher, Start Magazine, Arts and Culture of the South East, Ireland, November 24, 2004). 

Children are a central motif of the artist's work, from his earliest 1960s street performances to his more recent, 'bloodied' portraits. They are undoubtedly confrontational, all the more so for their hyper-realism and the fact, as a critic observed: 'Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children' (Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 17 November 2004).

Growing up in post-war Austria, Helnwein was shocked by the horror of what had happened during the Nazi reign, and continued to be shocked and enraged by a mixture of denial to the horrors that had been committed then and the continuing trend of such horrors in different guises: child abuse, greed, imperialism, militarism. His paintings are concerned with suffering, and in works such as the present Helnwein challenges the viewer. His aim? 'To jolt us from complacency' (Mic Moroney, Irish Arts Review, March 2015, p.86).