Biennale: Helnwein addresses the issues of our time

“O Lamb of God” draws crowds at this year’s Biennale

Numerous visitors gathered for the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale at St George’s Anglican Church on Campo San Vio to experience an expansive installation by Austrian-Irish artist Gottfried Helnwein, which received unanimous acclaim from the art world. After just ten days, the church had already welcomed around 10,000 visitors to the exhibition. Sir Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery in London and a guest at Helnwein’s installation “O Lamb of God”, for example, saw clear connections to “Agnus Dei” by the Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán, a work presented by the National Gallery in its current exhibition “VISIONS OF BAROQUE SPAIN”. Numerous museum professionals, including directors Ulrike Groos of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and Gerhard Lambrecht of the Kunsthalle Dessau, were equally enthusiastic about the exhibition by the now 78-year-old artist, curated by international exhibition curator Sebastian C. Strenger, as were prominent figures from society and politics.

Helnwein’s Biennale work indeed dominates the space of the large church nave with two 20 x 10 metre walls depicting partly oversized, indefinable floating figures in the form of children, converging towards a monumental image of Jesus positioned in central perspective. Here, however, Christ appears as a child, his wounds visible as stigmata, in the form of a boy of around eleven years old rather than in the conventional iconographic depiction of a man approximately 30 years of age. Altogether, the work forms a walk-in spatial installation covering around 1,000 square metres, with a sculpture by the artist placed at his feet in the sanctuary.

After the Biennale, the altar for the church’s services will remain here. Made from Carrara marble and Murano glass worked by the artist, it depicts a blindfolded marble child lying on a large block of marble beneath a glass cover. It directly evokes ancient sacrificial rituals in which a pure, flawless animal was selected and offered for sacrifice.

The elements of the installation originate in the artist’s distinctive visual world and his hyperrealistic style of painting, creating an intensified authenticity from the eyelashes to the drops of blood that transforms Helnwein’s hyperrealism into a shocking reality. In Venice too, Helnwein uses the means of painting to imitate the uncompromising objectivity of a camera while subtly catapulting his images into the realm of fiction. The staging of his monumental formats shown at the Biennale may remove the depicted subjects from an immediately tangible reality, yet at the same time it opens up spaces of association with the most important theme in the artist’s work: the child.

From the 1970s onwards, Helnwein devoted himself to this central theme in his work. The child serves as a symbol of the integrity and authenticity of the individual and as an ideal, almost the pinnacle of our existence, endowed with virtues such as limitless imagination and infinite creativity. At the same time, however, there is an inherent fragility resulting from children’s vulnerability and susceptibility to manipulation, as well as their constant exposure to the danger of humiliation, abuse, violence and cruelty. The child is also always the weakest member of society in conflicts and wars, and a symbol of the victim.

“With my work, I want to address areas that society so readily overlooks. I want to make visible things that people would rather suppress and leave unseen. I want to entice them to look at these things. The heroes of my stories are children, as a metaphor for potential innocence and for an invulnerability and invincibility that exist at the innermost core of the human being.”

Gottfried Helnwein was born in Vienna on 8 October 1948. In recognition of his achievements in the visual arts, the artist was recently awarded the Golden Commander’s Cross of the State of Lower Austria. A former master student of the “Fantastic Realist” Rudolf Hausner, he received numerous distinctions early in his career, including the Meisterschulpreis (1970), the Kardinal-König-Preis (1971) and the Theodor-Körner-Preis (1974). Helnwein left Austria in the 1980s and has lived and worked in Germany, Ireland, the United States and the Czech Republic. Helnwein’s work is currently on view at Museum SOLO in Madrid in his retrospective “MUNDOS INVERTIDOS”, which runs until November. At the end of November, the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona will present “LA GUERRA CONTINUA”, a dialogue between his work and that of the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. The exhibition “O Lamb of God”, presented in conjunction with the Biennale, was on view from 8 May to 2 August 2026, daily from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and was curated by international exhibition curator Sebastian C. Strenger.