Armando - The Wheel - Giclée on canvas - BAT/Archive - hand-signed

The wheel
Giclée on canvas
Year: 2013
hand-signed, numbered and inscribed with archive
Edition: Archive

Size: 107.5 × 106 cm

Condition: in good condition, slightly wavy, rolled

Armando, born Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd, spent his youth near Amersfoort, where the German occupiers established what was initially the police transit camp and later the Amersfoort concentration camp in 1938. This experience had a lasting impact on his work: the themes of violence, guilt, forgetting, life, death, and time became central to his work. From 1949 to 1954, the artist studied art history and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In 1958, Armando co-founded the "Nederlandse Informel Groep" and the "Gruppe Nul" (Netherlands Informal Group), which emerged from it in 1960. His early works were indebted to these groups but also displayed a closeness to the German "ZERO" movement. Armando worked primarily in series. In the 1960s, his works became more object-like; the objects were mounted on panels and usually painted over in monochrome black. After a three-year creative hiatus during which the artist theoretically explored early Romantic landscape painting, he returned to the expressiveness of his early works. As a DAAD scholarship holder, Armando moved to Berlin in 1979. There, in 1980, he painted the series "Black Flags," which explored the question of guilt and the relationship between perpetrators and victims of National Socialism. Parallel to this, he created works in rapid succession focusing on the themes of life and death, with landscape motifs playing a key role. The Neue Nationalgalerie was the first stop of a major traveling exhibition of Armando's works in 1984. In 1988, Armando first explored the medium of sculpture, and since the early 1990s, his work has been characterized by an intensive engagement with music. Armando passed away in 2018.