Armando, born as Herman Dirk Dodeweerd in Amsterdam on September 18, 1929, passed away on July 1, 2018, in Berlin-Potsdam. He was a very versatile artist. He played the violin in the Tata-Mirando Orchestra and was known for the VPRO television program Herenleed (together with Cherry Duyns). He also painted, drew, composed poetry and prose, was Chief Art Editor of The Hague Post, and wrote columns for the Dutch newspaper NRC. Above all, he was a sculptor.

In 1997, museum Beelden aan Zee acquired their first Armando, a monumental Kopf in bronze which was created that same year. Thanks to the donation of a couple, this collection was expanded considerably with a Kopf (1999), a Gestalt (1998) and a Rote Schale (2003).

Guilt, the Second World War, memory and a predominant sense of melancholy serve as the general themes of Armando’s work. As a sculptor, Armando used a bespoke visual language of large forms and their very expressive skins. The human figure is continuously distorted into a very essential form: a block, such as in 'koppoter' (a figure with a head but without a body). This sculpture, therefore, has some affinity with CoBrA. A mixture of the authentic, such as one finds in a playful child, and a consciousness that only mankind is capable of, gives the sculptures a strange presence. There is an unbearable lightness of existence that has always surprised Armando, and has been a driving force behind all his artistic work.