Gottfried Helnwein - Chronology

Chronology

• 1965–1969 Helnwein studied at the Vienna Higher College for Graphic Art (Höhere Grafische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, Wien).
• 1969–1973 He studied at the University of Visual Art in Vienna (Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien).

• At that time he began to work on a series of hyper-realistic watercolour-paintings of bandaged and wounded children.

• 1971 First public Aktions in the streets of Vienna, often with bandaged children (Aktion Sorgenkind, Aktion Hallo Dulder, Aktion Eternal Youth, Aktion Sandra).

• In the exhibition "Zoetus" at the Kunsthalle "Künstlerhaus" in Vienna, unidentified people put stickers with the words "Entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) on Helnwein's paintings.

• At the opening of an one man show at Galerie D. in Moedling, near Vienna, the Major has Helnwein's Artworks confiscated by the police.

• 1972 An exhibition at the "Galerie im Pressehaus" (Gallery of the House of the Press) is closed after 3 days because of strong protests and threats by the works council.

• 1979 Spurred into action by an interview in an Austrian tabloid in which the country's top court psychiatrist, Dr Heinrich Gross, admitted killing children at Vienna's Am Spiegelgrund Pediatric Unit during the war by poisoning their food, Helnwein painted Life not Worth Living – a watercolour of a little girl "asleep" on the table, her head in her plate. The painting was published in Austrias leading newsmagazine Profil and sparked a nationwide debate that finally led to Gross' appearing before a Vienna court. The judge ruled Gross was mentally unfit to be tried.

• 1982 Helnwein was offered a chair by the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, which he declined.

• 1983 Helnwein met Andy Warhol in his factory in New York, who posed for a series of photo-sessions.

• 1984 Austrian and German National Television co-produced the film Helnwein, directed by Peter Hajek. In Los Angeles, Helnwein meets Muhammad Ali, who appeared in his film. The film was awarded the Adolf Grimme Prize for best television-documentary and in the same year won the Eduard Rhein Prize and the Golden Kader of the city of Vienna for outstanding camera work.

• 1985 One man show at the Albertina, Vienna.

• Rudolf Hausner, recommended Helnwein as his successor as professor of the master-class for painting at the University of Visual Art in Vienna, but Helnwein left Vienna and moved to Germany. He bought a medieval castle close to Cologne and the Rhine-river, where he lived and worked till 1997.

• Besides his realistic work, Helnwein also began to develop abstract, expressive styles of painting during this period. He radically changes his way of working and now begins a series of large-format pictures consisting of several parts (diptychs, triptychs, poliptychs). In doing so he combines photomurals with abstract gestural and monochrome painting in oil and acrylic, also using reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich paintings and war documentary photographs which he assembles to form what Viennese art-critic Peter Gorsen calls "Bilderstrassen" (picture lanes).

• 1987 Der Untermensch, Gottfried Helnwein, self-portraits of from 1970–1987, one man show at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Strasbourg.

• Aktion Gott der Untermenschen (God of Sub-Humans), Performance at Camp Kopal, St. Pölten of the Austrian Army, using tanks and ammunition

• 1988, In remembrance of "Kristallnacht", the actual beginning of the Holocaust – 50 years earlier, Helnwein erected a 100 meter long installation in the city center of Cologne, between Ludwig Museum and the Cologne Cathedral. Just days into the exhibit, these portraits were vandalized by unknown persons, symbolically cutting the throats of the depicted children's faces. Since then large scale installations in public spaces became an important part of his work.

• 1989 One-man show at the Folkwang Museum in Essen.

• Torino Fotografia 1989, Biennale Internationale, Gottfried Helnwein, David Hockney, Clegg and Guttmann.

• 1989 Helnwein's photographic work from 1970 to 1989 was published in a monograph by Dai Nipon in Japan. Text by Toshiharu Ito.

• Helnwein met William S. Burroughs in Lawrence, Kansas.

• Cooperation with German poet and playwright Heiner Müller and choreographer Hans Kresnik on a play about Antonin Artaud.

• 1990 One-man show in the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne. Installation "Neunter November Nacht".

• 1990 Collaboration with Marlene Dietrich on the book Some Facts about Myself, for the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her essay that gave the book its title was the last text that Marlene Dietrich wrote in her life.

• 1991 Installation Kindskopf (Child's Head) in the Minoriten Church in Krems, Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum (Museum of Lower Austria). Helnwein painted a 6x4 m (18x12 feet) child's head for the apse of the early Gothic basilica.

• Helnwein finished 48 Portraits, a series of 48 monochrome red pictures of women (oil on canvas) as a counterpart to Gerhard Richter's "48 Portraits" of 1971, which depict only men in monochrome grey. The cycle of paintings was first shown at Galerie Koppelmann in Cologne, and later acquired by collector Peter Ludwig for the Collection of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

• Helnwein began to focus on digital photography and computer-generated images which he often combines with classical oil-painting techniques.

• 1993 One-man show at Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn.

• Aktion-Reaktion, exhibition of the Austrian painters Arnulf Rainer, Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Helnwein, works from the Schömer collection, at the Foundation Fiecht, Austria.

• 1994 Stage design, costumes, and make-up for Macbeth, a production of Hans Kresnik's Choreographic Theatre at Volksbühne Berlin . The play was awarded the Theatre Prize of Berlin.

• Helnwein curated and organized the first museum exhibition of Disney artist Carl Barks, the creator of the Donald Duck universe, Uncle Scrooge and Duckburg. The retrospective was shown in 10 European museums and seen by more than 400,000 visitors.

• 1997 Moved to Ireland .

• In the same year, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg organized a Helnwein retrospective and published a monograph of the artist .

• German collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig donated 53 works of Helnwein to the collection of the State Russian Museum Saint Petersburg.

• Photo-session with the German industrial metal band Rammstein. Their album Sehnsucht is released with six different covers by Gottfried Helnwein.

• 2000 The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shows Helnwein's Mickey I, (1995, oil and acrylic on canvas, 83" x 122") in the exhibition The Darker Side of Playland: Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection.

• Helnwein's Black Mirror, (Self-Portrait, polaroid, 1987) in the show Ghost in the Shell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• 2001 Stage and costume design for the Hamburgische Staatsoper of Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress.

• 2002 Helnwein established a studio in Los Angeles.

• 2003 Premiere of the Helnwein documentary Ninth November Night, the Art of Gottfried Helnwein at the Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles. Director: Henning Lohner, Commentators: Sean Penn, Maximilian Schell, Jason Lee, Introductory text by Simon Wiesenthal. (Camera: Jason Lee, Darren Rydstrom, Bernd Reinhardt).

• Collaboration with Marilyn Manson on the multi-media project The Golden Age of Grotesque and video productions like Doppelherz und Mobscene.

• Installation and performance with Manson at the Volksbühne Berlin.

• Collaboration with Sean Penn on the Music Video 'The Barry Williams Show' by Peter Gabriel

• 2004 The Child, Works by Gottfried Helnwein, one-man show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco Fine Arts Museums. The exhibition is seen by 130,000 visitors. The San Francisco Chronicle calls the exhibition the most important show of a contemporary artist in 2004.

• Collaboration with Maximilian Schell for the Richard Strauss opera Der Rosenkavalier at Los Angeles Opera, and Israeli Opera Tel Aviv.

• Helnwein receives Irish citizenship.

• 2005 Helnwein one man show Beautiful Children at the Ludwig Museum Schloss Oberhausen and the Wilhelm-Busch-Museum Hannover. Helnwein retrospective at the National Art Museum in Beijing.

• 2006 Face it, one man show, Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz

• The council of the city of Philadelphia honors Gottfried Helnwein for his artistic contributions in keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive

• 2007 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger acquired the painting "Death Valley (American Landscape I, 2002, oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 300 inches) for the Governor's Council Room at the California State Capitol in Sacramento.
• The Virtual Museum of Art at Second Life opened with a Helnwein retrospective. The VMOA is the first virtual Museum that is dedicated to the lifework of a living artist.

• Participation in the exhibition Rembrandt to Thiebaud: A Decade of Collecting Works on Paper, De Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

• 2008 Retrospective at Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague.
• I Walk Alone, one man show at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery, San Jose State University.

• On the occasion of the infamous incest case of Amstetten in Austria, the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung writes: "Amstetten between discomposure and media-hype: A dungeon amidst the town, a father inflicting martyrdom onto his children – how we struggle to put the pieces of the incomprehensible together. The dungeon in Amstetten touches something deep inside the marrow of the Austrians, their dark side, mirrored in the poems of their authors and in the Images of Gottfried Helnwein, depicting people with forkes pusched into their eyes. Or Girls with blood running down their legs. Helnwein's paintings are nightmares, that tell of the dungeons in our heads..."

• The last Child, Installation throughout the city of Waterford, Ireland.

• Kunst nach 1970 – Art after 1970, Albertina Museum Vienna.

• 2009 Friedman Benda Gallery, New York represents Gottfried Helnwein, one man show.

• Participation in two exhibitions at the Albertina Museum in Vienna: Body and Language – Contemporary Photography from the Albertina Collection, (Gottfried Helnwein, Chuck Close, Marie Jo Lafontaine, Jannis Kounnellis, Helmuth Newton, Erwin Wurm, John Coplans) and Masterpieces of Modern Art, The Permanent Collection of the Albertina and the Baitliner Collection.

• 2010 For the Israeli Opera Gottfried Helnwein creates sets and costumes for Gil Shohat's opera adaptation of the play The Child Dreams by Hanoch Levin.

• The Installation Ninth November Night in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Gottfried Helnwein currently lives and works in Ireland and Los Angeles.