Gottfried Helnwein - Reality and Fiction
ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
Descending down the familiar escalator in the Albertina Museum, there returns this feeling of certainty that you are embarking on a time well spent. I've always liked that escalator; it provides a quiet void, a small separation from the outside world above you, as you enter the world of the exhibition - the first work slowly revealing itself in front of you as you are carried down. The exhibition starts off strong with a larger-than-life portrait of a small girl, vulnerable children being Gottfried Helnwein’s central painting subject for decades. The Austrian painter is interested in depicting the children’s vulnerability to the outside world - politics, war, adults. This being an overview of his work over three decades, you can see this fascination evolve throughout the painting and take on different forms, nevertheless, the aggression and urgency his paintings emit is ever-present. It results in paintings of kids holding guns, sleeping, or wrapped in pieces of bloody gauze, the shock factor as intentional as ever. Years ago, the boom of huge advertisement campaigns prompted Helnwein to switch watercolours out for huge-scale canvasses and oil paints that would allow for the hyper-realism he is best known for. All this, so he could grab the audience’s attention and bring his point across - bigger is better in this case.
And it works, each and every canvas commands the viewer’s attention. If you let your eyes glide over each strand of perfectly painted hair, each drop of blood, it’s hard to believe these scenes are not real. To a certain extent they are; Helnwein works from exact photo references allowing him to perfect aspects such as light and composition while being able to focus on other aspects. Specifically, he puts a lot of focus on colour. Some of his paintings work with very reduced colour palettes, while others go to a monochromatic extreme of only using different shades of one colour. In his series titled Sleep, he not only opts for single-colour canvasses but also obscures light, forcing the viewer to find the right angle for a complete view of the painting. This deliberate contradiction - clean and serene scenes contradicting the disturbing themes depicted - makes this exhibition anything but easy entertainment.
Many of Helnwein’s paintings prompt the viewer to question the boundary between revulsion, beauty, and innocence, but the artist himself seems to believe in humanity after all. He thinks ultimately, there is innocence in all of us. The vulnerability he depicts functions as a metaphor for the belief that at its core, every human being is good. This aspect of his work has also swung the opposite way and made him a highly controversial artist, especially in the German-speaking territories. Most notably, his artworks referencing Nazi imagery, which draw upon a childhood stained by the previous regime and where Vienna was an unfriendly, sad city to grow up in. To put this into context, the post-war era in Vienna produced a wave of art that can be described as highly aggressive and full of trauma. Helnwein himself has said that art is a coping mechanism, a way of grappling with the world and calling attention to topics he finds important. Keeping in mind Austria’s maintenance of its victim mentality in connection to the Third Reich, it’s quite obvious why Helnwein’s attempts at disrupting this nationwide amnesia would be met with disdain in the past. That said, times have certainly changed, a monumental exhibition in the Albertina being a testament to a changing cultural landscape.
