Gottfried Helnwein quotes

Gottfried Helnwein is an Austrian-Irish visual artist known for his provocative and hyper-realistic works. His art often explores themes of trauma, childhood, and social injustice, blending photography, watercolor, and installation. He is acclaimed internationally for his powerful imagery and striking exhibitions. Here are 18 of his quotes:

Imaginations and illusions are always so much more powerful and bigger than this mediocre and boring thing called reality.

Gottfried Helnwein

Art is a weapon for me, with which I can strike back.

Gottfried Helnwein

The first time I saw a picture of Elvis - I was in a state of shock, because I couldn't believe that a human being could be so beautiful.

Gottfried Helnwein

"High" and "low" are completely arbitrary and artificial distinctions that some bloated assholes invented to make life more complicated. Comics are considered "low", but when Roy Lichtensein comes and picks out one panel of a comic, projects and paints it on a canvas then it's suddenly "high" art? Give me a break. The only thing that I care about in art is quality, intensity. Is a work of art capable of touching and moving me? Does it cause an emotional impact on me? Does it startle, surprise, upset, excite me? Does it make me think? Does it inspire me? Does it stimulate my imagination? Does it change the way I view the world to some degree?

Gottfried Helnwein

Opening my first Donald Duck comic book felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I squinted cautiously because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the dazzlingly bright sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze into my dusty lungs that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin. I was back home again, in a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and perforated by bullets without serious harm. A world in which people still looked proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses. And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life - Donald Duck.

Gottfried Helnwein

Most societies are ruled by mediocre people that have no vision and no imagination. Most rulers are scared of creation and creative people. Artists are funny people. All they want is to touch and move, challenge and surprise others. But dictators hate surprises more than anything else. All they want is to turn their territory into a neat little toy prison camp and play with their little toy people. Push them around, rip a leg or a head off now and then or throw them into the garbage when they are tired of their stupid, little doll faces.

Gottfried Helnwein

My question always was: why do people always cause so much pain to other people? Why does everybody look so hurt? When I started to paint I didn't feel I had any message. My art was not an answer – it was a question.

Gottfried Helnwein

When I look at a work of Art I ask myself: does it inspire me, does it touch and move me, do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me - do I get excited, upset? That is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any information about art? I've always had a problem with art that you can only understand if you have a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories. Most of them are bullshit anyway. Most critics and theorists have little respect for artists, and I think the importance of theory in art is totally overrated. Real art is self-evident. 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.

Gottfried Helnwein

If anyone from Austrian fine art of the last fifty years could be called a star, then there is only one person who meets all the criteria: Gottfried Helnwein.

Gottfried Helnwein

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.

Gottfried Helnwein

The grimaces on these mocking distorted faces signalize disobedience, opposition and turmoil, as well as a kind of childlike autonomy in the depraved world of adults. The grin found on the faces of ill-treated children, a grotesque picture puzzle which includes both the martyrdom and subversion of mankind is entirely Helnwein's invention. It is manifested in the metamorphic images of injured bodies. It is an obsessive pattern which is repeated in Helnwein's pictoral representation of the world and in his staged artistic actions, serving as a metaphor for the invulnerability and invincibility deeply seated in man.

Gottfried Helnwein

When I started to paint, I painted children because I just felt that I wanted to take their side. What always upset me was how children are getting abused simply because they are physically weaker and not capable of defending themselves - how they get raped, enslaved and killed. I never understood why some people seemed to have fun causing pain to someone smaller.

Gottfried Helnwein

I never understood why some people seemed to have fun causing pain to someone smaller.

Gottfried Helnwein

How does a friendly person like Helnwein stand making his - excellent - painting into a mirror of the terrors of this century? Or is it that he can't stand not doing it? Does his mirror just reflect the attitude of the century? Terror without end is better than ending in Terror.

Gottfried Helnwein

Helnwein's subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead creates the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within.

Gottfried Helnwein

Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it. In his work he is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty. But 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. 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.

Gottfried Helnwein