“My art is not an answer, it is a question”

Abstract

Gottfried Helnwein is an Austrian artist known for his hyperrealistic paintings of children, in which he utilizes an obscure aesthetics and discusses the themes of violence and Nazism. This article intends to understand how these images act in society, arousing the debate about such subjects. For that, the cases of the watercolor Life not worth living (1979) and the installation Selektion (Ninth November Night), placed in Cologne, Germany, in the year of 1988, will be analyzed.