PORTRAITS
Visualizing the Unknown
A portrait begins with a face, but it does not end there.
Throughout his work, Frank van Hemert explores portraiture as a way of looking beyond appearance — into the space between the visible person and the presence that remains hidden.
The people portrayed in his paintings are artists, writers, musicians, thinkers and other individuals whose faces and identities have become part of our collective memory. Yet recognition is only the starting point.
Van Hemert does not seek to reproduce a familiar image. He searches for something less tangible: character, vulnerability, strength, solitude, desire, tension and the traces of an inner life.
Sometimes a single person returns in several portraits. Each new painting becomes another encounter, another possibility, another attempt to approach what cannot be fully known.
The portrait is therefore not a conclusion. It is a question.
What remains when the familiar face falls away?
What might exist behind the image we think we know?
His portraits are an ongoing exploration of the unknown.
FRANCIS BACON
10 portraits · each 160 × 130 cm
Beyond the distorted face
In these 10 portraits I am not interested in reproducing Bacon’s recognizable appearance. I am searching for the presence behind the distortion — the tension, solitude, obsession, fears and brutality of a man who made the human condition his subject.
Ten portraits. Ten encounters with the mind behind the image.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
4 portraits · each 160 × 130 cm
Beyond the crown
In these portraits I look beyond the cultural icon and the mythology surrounding him, searching for the person behind the marks, the symbols and the noise.
Four portraits. One restless presence.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
7 portraits · each 160 × 130 cm
Beyond the self-portrait
In these portraits I look beyond the famous self-portraits. I am searching for the human presence behind the myth — his sensitivity, his fear, intensity and longing that continue to make Van Gogh’s image so compelling.
Seven portraits. One face that still refuses to become silent.
GILBERT PROESCH
160 × 130 cm
Beyond the persona
In this portrait I am interested in that uncertainty. Who is the man behind the carefully created image? Where does the persona end and the person begin?
The portrait becomes an encounter with an identity that is both revealed and concealed.
CY TWOMBLY
3 portraits · each 160 × 130 cm
Beyond the gesture
In these portraits I look for the person behind that language — the quiet, intellectual and poetic presence that lies beneath the apparent spontaneity of the work.
Three portraits become three different approaches to an artist who made the invisible trace of thought visible.
EDVARD MUNCH
160 × 130 cm
Beyond the scream
In this portrait I look beyond the familiar symbol and toward the man who spent his life exploring love, jealousy, loneliness, desire, illness and death.
The challenge is not to paint the artist who created The Scream, but to search for the human being who experienced the world with such extraordinary intensity.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
160 × 130 cm
Beyond the legend
In this portrait, I look beyond the public image and the legend, searching for the human presence behind the familiar face — the man behind the myth.
DAVID BOWIE
160 × 130 cm
Beyond the persona
In this portrait, I look beyond the transformations and the legend, searching for the human presence behind the ever-changing image.
FRANZ LISZT
40 × 30 cm
Beyond the virtuoso
In this portrait I look beyond the legendary performer and search for the presence behind the applause — the man whose inner world could never be contained by the stage.
BEYOND THE IMAGE
Every portrait begins with what we think we know.
A face.
A name.
A history.
A public image.
But painting can open a space beyond recognition.
The face remains visible, yet something else begins to emerge — something uncertain, intimate and impossible to fully define.
Perhaps that is where the portrait truly begins.
Not the person we know.
Not the image we remember.
But the presence that remains unknown.
Visualizing the Unknown.