wowe . Essence . Twenty-five Years of Portraits

13 December 2008 to 15 February 2009

Every face is unique, yet its expressions are universally intelligible. Whether joy, sorrow, happiness, contentment, or fear—people’s faces reflect moods and emotions, reveal information about age, sex, and social circumstances. By controlling our facial expressions, we can conceal or disguise things or pretend to be something we’re not. So when face to face with others, we know exactly what they are looking at but can never be completely sure of what they see. What results is the complex dialectic between recognition and non-recognition, closeness and distance, that makes the face the “most interesting surface for us in the world” (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg).