Saturday, September 19, 2009

Mercedes Helnwein in Lula magazine








Stills from short film on Lula magazine's website of artist Mercedes Helnwein preparing for her exhibition 'East of Eden'. Click here and then click on 'Dark Star' to view short film. (Found via Karolina).

"Mercedes Helnwein was born in Vienna, Austria, daughter to renowned painter and art provocateur Gottfried Helnwein. With a deep fascination developing early on in her childhood for both the visual arts as well as literature, she began to dedicate her time equally among the two.

She moved to Ireland with her family, where she spent her teens drawing, writing and listening to the blues. Her influences, which range from Southern Gothic traditions to the cartoons of Robert Crumb, to nineteenth Century Russian literature, American motel culture and the Delta blues, eventually landed her in a style distinctly her own - unsettling, direct and quietly humorous.

In 2000 she added Los Angeles as a second home and officially began her career by contributing some of her drawings to a show hosted by Jason Lee, one of the first to collect her work. Teaming up w/friend and photographer Alex Prager, Mercedes Helnwein continued by exhibiting regularly around L.A. in unorthodox one-night shows, which attracted the attention of the media as well galleries, and lead to her exhibiting her shows 'Last Chapter of Dreaming', “Strange Days” and “Local News” in Berlin, Dublin & New York in 2006 and 2007.

In 2008 Simon and Schuster published her first novel 'The Potential Hazards of Hester Day'."

-- read more here and learn more about Mercedes Helnwein here.

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