He has worked as a painter, draftsman, photographer, muralist, sculptor, installation and performance artist, using a wide variety of techniques and media.

[2] His father Joseph Helnwein worked for the Austrian Post and Telegraphy administration (Österreichische Post- und Telegraphenverwaltung), and his mother Margarethe was a housewife.

[2][17] Helnwein moved to Dublin, Ireland, in 1997 and one year later he bought the Castle Gurteen de la Poer in County Waterford.

[19] On 3 December 2005, his friend Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese were married in a private, non-denominational ceremony at Helnwein's castle.

One sees, too, the common ground of his works with those of Arnulf Rainer and Hermann Nitsch, two other Viennese, who display their own bodies in the frame of reference of injury, pain, and death.

The bandaged child became the most important figure next to the artist himself allied with him in his actions: the embodiment of the innocent, defenceless individual at the mercy of brute force.

Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture critic, wrote: "Helnwein's large format, photo-realist images of children of various demeanors boldly probed the subconscious.

[30] At the same time when Helnwein painted watercolors of injured and abused children, from 1969, around 1970/71 he also began a series of self-portrayals in photographs and performances (actions) in his studio and in the streets of Vienna.

Actionistic self-portrayals in the manner of a happening featuring his injured and bandaged body and surgical instruments deforming his face go back to Helnwein's student days.

Some of Helnwein's grimacing faces also recall the grotesque physiognomic distortions by the eighteenth-century Viennese sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt.

And in order to attack the basic misconception, he must underline and exaggerate by distortion, by bandages and metal instruments that force the face into impossible molds.

[33]In a conversation with Robert A. Sobieszek, curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Helnwein declared: "The reason why I took up the subject of self-portraits and why I have put myself on stage was to function as a kind of representative for the suffering, abused and oppressed human being.

Growing up in a dreary, destroyed post-war Vienna, the young boy was surrounded by unsmiling people, haunted by a recent past they could never speak about.

Alicia Miller commented on Helnwein's work in Artweek: "In 'The Darker Side of Playland', the endearing cuteness of beloved toys and cartoon characters turns menacing and monstrous.

In those dreams, long before any adult understanding of the specific pains and evils that live holds, the familiar and comforting objects and images of a child's world are rent with something untoward.

His portrait of Disney's favorite mouse occupies an entire wall of the gallery; rendered from an oblique angle, his jaunty, ingenuous visage looks somehow sneaky and suspicious.

Commenting on that aspect in Helnwein's work, Julia Pascal wrote in the New Statesman: "His early watercolor Peinlich (Embarrassing)[38] shows a typical little 1950s girl in a pink dress and carrying a comic book.

[39] Living between Los Angeles and Ireland, Helnwein met and photographed the Rolling Stones in London, and his portrait of John F. Kennedy made the cover of Time magazine on the 20th anniversary of the president's assassination.

Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali, Burroughs[41] and the German industrial metal band Rammstein[42] posed for him; some of his art-works appeared in the cover-booklet of Michael Jackson's History album.

Among his widely published works is a spoof of the famous Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks, entitled Boulevard of Broken Dreams, depicting Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Humphrey Bogart.

[46] Examining his imagery from the 1970s to the present, one sees influences as diverse as Bosch, Goya, John Heartfield, Beuys and Mickey Mouse, all filtered through a postwar Viennese childhood.

[47] 'Helnwein's oeuvre embraces total antipodes: The trivial alternates with visions of spiritual doom, the divine in the child contrasts with horror-images of child-abuse.

The arrangement of the figures clearly relates to motive and iconography of the adoration of the three Magi, such as were common especially in the German, Italian and Dutch 15th century artworks.