|
|
Fenton Art Gallery: Gottfried Helnwein - 16th September - 7th October 2006
|
|
|
|
|
-
Gottfried Helnwein
-
From 16th September 2006
Major international artist Gottfried Helnwein will present his first Irish commercial exhibition at the Fenton Gallery this September.
Born in Austria (1948), Helnwein now lives between Ireland and the USA and has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the U.S. In an internationally acclaimed career, which has spanned over 30 years, Helnwein has produced work in a range of media including painting, drawing, photography, performance, large-scale public installations, set design and film. Well known for his provocative imagery, Helnwein’s earlier work referenced Nazi Europe. Major exhibitions of Helnwein’s work have been held worldwide, most recently at the Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz and at The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
In this exhibition, entitled Modern Sleep, Helnwein presents us with a series of paintings based on the theme of the child - a theme which has been central to his practice throughout his career. His characteristic presentation of the child with downcast closed eyes is compelling.
Previous solo exhibitions have included shows at The State Russian Museum in St.Petersburg, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Art Museum in Beijing and an exhibition of his landscape paintings at Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork in 2004. His work is included in major collections worldwide.
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)
Writer
"You can't show anyone anything he hasn't seen already, on some level - any more than you can tell anyone anything he doesn't already know. It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.
Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition."
Sean Penn
Actor, Director
"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it.
I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried does.
Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas.
A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this. This level of work is earned.
- I've made it a conscious effort to not analyze anything I love too much. And I love this art, and for me part of the reason is a professional reason - for me as somebody who aspires to creativity myself. When you find someone in the arts, whether it's in your medium or in another medium, that raises the bar for you, that reinvigorates your own pursuit of affecting people and out of a sharing what you count on as some kind of a common chord in us. Whether it's through imagery, words or sounds.
As an artist my strongest reaction to Helnwein's work is that it challenges me to be better at what I do. There are very few people that achieve utter excellence in what they do.
And I think that Gottfried Helnwein is certainly one of those people."
Jonathon Keats
Novelist, artist, art-critic
"This was the moment when I sensed for the first time', Helnwein has since written, '[that] you can change something with aesthetics, you can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the powerful and strong to slide and totter, anything actually if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means.' For the following three-and-a-half decades he has relentlessly pursued that goal, masterfully incorporating everything from painting to performance to photography, regularly causing art world outcry and public fury. Yet, his art is successful less for its evident tendency to provoke than for its extraordinary ability to perplex.
My art is not giving answers," Helnwein has said. "It is asking questions." In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own."
| | | |
UNTITLED (Payton4)
2005
Mixed media on canvas (oil & acrylic),
160 x 106cm
|
|
|
