GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN | Kindskopf (Head of a Child) III

The Artist
Modernism Inc., San Francisco
Acquired from the above by the present owner

San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein, July 2004 - January 2005, illustrated in colour (cover)
San Francisco, Modernism Inc., Gottfried Helnwein: Red Harvest, February - March 2017

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background is bluer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection some light handling marks and rub marks to the extreme edges and some small media accretions in places throughout. Inspection in raking light reveals some matte spots of paint, most notably to the right strap of the figure's top, which fluoresce darkly when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Hugely imposing and yet starkly intimate, Head of a Child is a monumental photorealistic painting from Gottfried Helnwein’s iconic Kindskopf series. The work bears close resemblance to the unforgettable Selektion series (1988): seventeen huge portraits of children’s heads - positioned facing Cologne cathedral along a one hundred meter long wall - serve as a poignant commemoration of the Kristallnacht night exactly fifty years after its occurrence. Likewise in Head of a Child, an image of a young girl – intensely large and close is rendered by the artist in an astute melange of acrylic and oil, exhibiting a sumptuous hyper-realism in the face itself. The neck and shoulders are softly blurred and muted, recalling the spectral aura of Gerhard Richter’s seismic work Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1992). Initially peaceful and meditative, the child gives off a disarmingly thoughtful presence for someone so young. Then, as viewing continues, a deep shadow under the chin builds a tension relievable only by a sudden movement of the face that never occurs: a non-actual, imagined event that – like the conceptual works of Robert Barry – extends the artwork to the minds and dreams of the viewers. Once we see that the aura of an image is determined by its architectural context, we can understand Helnwein’s decision to install certain works of the series in religious buildings. Aura is conferred by a combination of the intrinsic nature of the image and the architectural, spatial properties of the containing space. Thus it was not reproduction of the image, but its indiscriminate spatial distribution, that abolished imagistic aura. Accordingly, like 15th century devotional images of Jesus in childhood, one of Helnwein’s Kindskopf works served as an altarpiece in the Gothic church at Krems. There is however a dual irony at work here. On the one hand, Helnwein’s cultivation of aura is facilitated by the very technology of digital printing that had, through relentless dissemination, stripped it away. And on the other, this apparent reverence of the image is masterfully undercut and picked apart.

The powerful atmosphere generated by Head of a Child is a response to what Helnwein perceives as a misguided mythos around the concept of childhood. In Licht-kind (1972), Helnwein depicted an infant as saviour in order to satirise the Christian myth of the redeemer child. Prevalent in the bourgeois nuclear family, the symbol of childhood was used as a barrier to systemic change: the injustices of adult life attributed not to contingent and changeable circumstances, but to the inevitable fall from innocence supposedly entailed by maturation. In Head of a Child, Helnwein destabilises and problematises these assumptions. He portrays the child not as fantastically innocent but as a person. In refusing to exploit the child by reducing her to a symbol, Head of a Child produces a palpable and moving respect for its subject.