HELNWEIN: mundos invertidos

From 25 March to 30 November, SOLO Independencia is hosting the first major exhibition in Spain by the Austro-Irish painter, photographer and performance artist Gottfried Helnwein (Vienna, Austria, 1948), a master of startling recognition. Internationally renowned for his hyper-realistic imagery, Helnwein addresses the betrayal of childhood innocence, the horrors of fascism, and the convergence of popular culture and violence.

The exhibition features many of the artist's most iconic creations, alongside a selection of works from the SOLO collection. The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of more than a dozen different collections and includes important pieces loaned by the artist himself, as well as newly created sculptures and oil paintings. In Helnwein's inverted worlds, fiction and reality combine to portray the most disturbing aspects of human nature.

In his works, cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck reveal a dark side, manga-inspired figures populate scenes of real disasters, and nightmare visions take physical form. Helnwein's images of injured or bandaged children show the consequences of conflict, while the machinery of power is depicted in paintings featuring weapons or uniformed elites.

The exhibition is completed by a selection of works by more than 30 different artists, such as sculptures by Keiichi Tanaami, Magda Kirk and Kayoko Mizumoto, drawings by El Roto, Raymond Pettibon and Juan Barjola, and recent artificial intelligence video creations by Ulyss3s.