Opening Reception Hosted by Beck: Saturday, November 13, 8-11pm
Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present Temptation To Be Good, a solo exhibition by Mercedes Helnwein. Known for the shockingly detailed pencil drawings that have earned her such collectors as Damien Hirst (who bought out Helnwein’s “Whistling Past the Graveyard” exhibition in London, early 2010), Nicolas Cage, and Beck (who currently has a selection of her work on his website and will host the opening reception on November 13th), Helnwein once again lets loose the strange and addictive world which inhabits her studio.
In her new exhibition, Helnwein uses oil pastels to create a sultry style that is a nouveau hybrid between painting and drawing. The series of large-scale women’s faces, executed in thick, Technicolor hues, are both vibrant and passive, yielding a decisive tension in their execution. Although discreet in their appearance, there is nothing moderate about the faces of these girls. The stories that dig themselves through their expressions – the slightly parted lips, raised eyebrows, sideward glances or wide-open expressions – although direct, are disquietingly enigmatic. The calamity preceeding their reactions has been pushed off the edge of the paper, and the resulting limbo is seductive and mesmerizing.
Influenced by Southern Gothic traditions, the cartoons of Robert Crumb, Nineteenth Century Russian literature, American Motel culture, and the Delta Blues, Helnwein’s style is a subtle balance of humor and quietly bizarre, cinematic suspense.
Art critic and writer Peter Frank says of the artist: “A writer as well as visual artist, Mercedes Helnwein does not so much tell stories or even capture moments in her drawings as she triggers possibilities—the possibilities being vaguely unlikely, vaguely unsavory, and not-so-vaguely menacing, rather like inverse Magrittes.”
Accompanying the exhibition is a two-minute video projection, which picks up where the drawings leave off and gives the audience a backdoor to the goings-on in the drawings and paintings. The artist’s brother, composer Ali Helnwein, contributed the music.
"Mercedes Helnwein's immaculately executed drawings play out like dramatically lit, attractively cast indie flicks… The talented offspring of Austrian-Irish painter-photographer-performance artist Gottfried Helnwein, pictures a cast of strong, mysterious, seductive, peculiar women.” -NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Helnwein was born in Vienna, Austria and raised in a castle in Ireland. In 2000, Helnwein added Los Angeles as a second home and began exhibiting her artwork. Her work has shown in the U.S., Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, and the U.K. In 2008, Helnwein published her first novel, The Potential Hazards of Hester Day. The artist splits her time between Ireland and downtown Los Angeles.
