Born in Austria
1973
Academy of Visual Art, Vienna, Austria
Lives and works in Ireland and Los Angles

Through disturbing images from the Holocaust, Catholicism and unsettling sequences of nightmares, Gottfried Helnwein’s works represent the real-time Armageddon of our civilisation.

According to Helnwein, real art is “self-evident, intense, challenging, enchanting, exciting and unsettling”, thus it can create an emotional impact regardless of the socio-cultural background of individual viewers. Helnwein’s highly thematised and staged images of violence, pain and indifference constantly remind us of the condition of our culture and civilisation - materialism, consumerism and decadence.

Helnwein’s works are in public collections of prestigious art institutions such as the Museum for Contemporary Art, Vienna, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC to name a few.