"Vous ne pourrez rien montrer à quelqu’un qu’il n’ait déjà vu, autre part, vous ne pourrez rien lui dire non plus qu’il ne vît déjà.
C’est la fonction de l’artiste que de provoquer l’expérience de la surprise d’indentifier: de montrer au spectateur qu’il sait sans savoir qu’il sait. Helnwein est un maître en l’art de la surprise d’identifier."

"Helnwein is one of the few exciting painters we have today."

"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.
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."

"Comment un homme aussi sympathique qu’Helnwein supporte-t-il de faire de son – excellente – peinture un miroir des horreurs de ce siècle? A moins qu’il ne supporte pas de ne pas le faire? Son miroir ne reflète-t-il qu’une attitude propre à ce siècle: mieux vaut la terreur sans fin qu’une fin dans la terreur – résultat d’une surévaluation de la mort et conséquence de sa «tabouisation» par les statistiques. Persée guillotine la Gorgone devant un miroir, mais la tête qui tombe est la sienne. Combien de têtes a-t-on/l’être humain a-t-il à notre époque de miroirs?"

"The paintings and pastels by Gottfried Helnwein appear to be photorealist. But unlike his sharp-focus colleagues, Helnwein's paintings carry powerful covert messages. He is a politically committed artist ... and in his case, you get more than what you see.
His work, in a multiplicity of media, manifests Nietzsche's assertion that "Authenticity of the creative artist can supply meaning to the despair and absurdity of existence."

"For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission. His 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."

"For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses.
Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public.
Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society."

"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."

"I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling of Gottfried Helnwein's "Kindskopf" (Head of a Child) in the Russian Museum.
And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions, seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental space of the museum's exhibition-hall, - I realised that I was looking at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new point of view. "

"Est-ce un pur hasard si Gottfried Helnwein, l’Autrichien, a fait un portrait de ces deux hommes, de l’Allemand et de l’Américain? Est-ce un hasard s’il a photographié Warhol sous les traits d’un fantôme inquiétant et s’il a peint Beuys? Et si de surcroît, il a photographié le portrait peint de Beuys dans les mains d’Arno Breker, le sculpteur favori d’Hitler? Il semble que certaines raisons autorisent à voir en Helnwein l’héritier légitime de Beuys et de Warhol."

"Warhol is the pre-Helnwein ... "

"Wenn man in der österreichischen bildenden Kunst der letzten fünfzig Jahre jemanden als Star bezeichnen möchte, dann kommt, unter Berücksichtigung aller Kennzeichen, nur einer in Betracht: Gottfried Helnwein. "

"Gottfried Helnwein is my mentor - on any artistic thing I've done.
His fight for expression and stance against oppression are reasons why I chose him as an artistic partner. An artist that doesn't provoke will be invisible. Art that doesn't cause strong emotions has no meaning. Helnwein has that internalized."

"What Helnwein creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, including those of LACMA and the Smithsonian, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive. 'People are surprised', he says, when they discern that he doesn't seem insane."

"Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.
But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes."

"As long ago as 1963 a fellow-artist and I imagined the horrible future of a free-lance artist.
The topic of our discussion was not so much finances as the necessity of letting go and totally abandoning oneself. At the time I had the idea of inventing something like a "fitness training of geniuses".
In retrospect I must say that I know very few artists who have persevered in this imaginary training programme.
Gottfried Helnwein is one of them. "

"With titles like ‘‘The Murmur of the Innocents’’ and ‘‘God of Sub-Humans,’’ these works — executed with obsessive, old-master-worthy technique — can be as bludgeoning as, say, a Rammstein riff, but you can’t take your eyes off them"

"Gottfried Helnwein is a genius!"

"Gottfried Helnwein is the world's Finest Artist"

"Gottfried is a genius, and possibly my favorite living artist"