Image: Galerie Kovacek & Zetter, Vienna
‘Mercedes Helnwein – Ground Zero’ is the title of the primary news item. The linked exhibition page lists 13 works by Mercedes Helnwein: ‘Street III’, ‘Hormones’, ‘The Night seemed impaled on a Spear’, ‘Soulmate’, ‘Parking lot (Supergirl)’, ‘Sunset’, ‘Car Crash’, ‘Witch’, ‘Nurse smoking’, ‘Man Holding Small Car’, ‘Kelly’, ‘Michelle with Rash III’ and ‘Cheap Shot I’.
The artist page identifies Mercedes Helnwein as a visual artist and writer, born in Vienna in 1979 and living and working in Downtown Los Angeles.
As described in the supplied account of her drawings, Helnwein presents possibilities rather than simply telling stories or recording individual moments; those possibilities are unlikely, subtly uncomfortable and not entirely without a vague sense of threat. The description places a figure in an unnaturally lit yet familiar space, where the figure is absorbed in and saturated with an unavoidable boredom while conducting a conversation with itself, someone or something else.
In that account, the Other is never a threat, while the other person never appears to be a love or a best friend, keeping the narrative tension at a low heat; its undefined indefinability makes the tension more compelling.
Helnwein is described as self-taught and as having deliberately chosen not to attend art school, drawing instead on influences ranging from Southern Gothic and Robert Crumb’s cartoons to 19th-century literature, American motel culture and Delta blues. She moved to Los Angeles in 2000 and began showing her drawings publicly through self-initiated one-night exhibitions, often presenting them with one or two other emerging artists.
