These two portraits of criminals, wrought on paper with ink and pencil, are works by the eclectic Thomas Schütte, an artist known primarily for his sculptures. Through the representation of these faces, Schütte takes up a topic he had previously addressed in several plastic works, that of the individual, whose darkest and most evil aspects are accentuated here. Schütte characterizes the two faces with just a few decisive strokes and surrounds them with a black backdrop. It is precisely from this act of limiting to the essential and the lack of contextualization that the two portraits derive their expressive power.