Looking at Gottfried Helnwein's portraits, we once again experience the shock of the new, of an unprecedented view of the person opposite.
I have observed many people confronted with these portraits for the first time and again and again they would show surprise, intensity of experience and fascination.
Helnwein's portraits can be seen as of the same substance as Cindy Sherman's, she seeing hers as a visual discourse with her times through the example of her own being, or Joel Peter Witkin's, who traces the injuries a person has experienced.
In his self-portraits, bandagings and woundings Gottfried Helnwein pursues similar themes and in his Faces, too, he does not seek the surface but encounters with the individual. In this series of works we meet people we have seen untold times in photographs, yet we could be meeting them now for the first time or, at least, feel we have never seen them so close at hand.
