Armando

Armando – Early years as musician, imprinted by the Nazi dictatorship

Armando was born Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd in Amsterdam on 18 September 1929. His musical talent revealed itself early on when he began playing the violin at the age of only five. Armando initially remained true to music and in the 1940s was a member of many varied bands, playing mostly swing and gypsy music. However, there were dark shadows in his childhood and teenage years which imprinted his whole life and artistic practice, for the National Socialists erected a concentration camp close to Amersfoot, where he spent his youth. These experiences he gathered of death, suffering and pain – and the fight against forgetting and the memories – ran a thread through the artist’s work. He started a course in philosophy and art history in 1949 and that same year began drawing and soon started composing his own poems. During his career, he composed a total of seven volumes of poetry.

Black memories define a great artistic career

Armando increasingly discovered painting and in 1958 founded the Dutch Informelle group with several fellow artists including Jan Schoonhoven and Jan Hendrikse, two years later the group nul, whilst in the years that followed, he moved ever closer to the ZERO group, originally founded in Düsseldorf. As a writer, he cased a sensation with an interview tape in which he questioned members of the Waffen SS in the Netherlands, and in doing so, also succeeded in initiating a public discourse. From 1973, Armando also turned to sculpture where he reproduced in bronze many of the things that he had depicted in his pictures. His later pictures had already exhibited a powerful tendency to the object: He mounted selected items onto panels and painted over them with black paint. For a long time, black was the predominant element in Armando’s art; only in later years was it joined by more and more dashes of colour. A bursary enabled him to move to Berlin here he celebrated further artistic successes, and in 1996 became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. He participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel and repented his homeland of the Netherlands at the 41st Venice Biennale. A museum dedicated to the artist was opened in 1998, but fell victim to fire in 2007.

Armando died in Potsdam on 1 July 2018.