Armando Dutch, 1929-2018

Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd, who later adopted the nom de plume Armando, was born in 1929 in Amsterdam. He grew up in the nearby town of Amersfoort, where, during his formative years, a nearby Nazi transit camp provided the young artist with an intimate view of human cruelty and suffering. This experience profoundly affected him and infused his artistic career with themes of war, memory, trauma, and human suffering.

After the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945, Armando studied art history at the University of Amsterdam. As he began his own artistic practice, he was inspired by the CoBrA art movement, which was gaining momentum in the Low Countries. This movement, founded by such notable abstract artists as Karel Appel, Corneille, and Jean Dubuffet, influenced Armando's work through its use of primary colors, white space, heavy paint application, and emphasis on materiality. He held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Le Carard in Amsterdam in 1954, debuting a series of abstract works executed in the impasto technique, characterized by thick surfaces and rough textures, which gave his work emotional and formal depth.

Armando quickly became a significant figure in the Dutch art community. In 1958, he was a founding member of the Dutch Informal Group (the "Informelen") and shortly after joined Europe's reactionary ZERO/Nul movement. This movement rejected traditional painting techniques in favor of non-traditional, conceptual materials, which, in recalling the militarization he witnessed during his formative years, led Armando to incorporate metal bolts and car tires into his canvases and wall reliefs. In his later printwork, he used abrasive carborundum plates to create textured prints that echo his relief-based early works.

In addition to visual art, Armando's body of work includes poetry and journalistic writings, as well as writing for theater, music, and television. In describing his multidisciplinary oeuvre, Armando admitted to aiming for a "Gesamtkunstwerk" (a total artwork) in which painting, writing, and performance merge, with the boundaries between visual art and media porous. In 2006, Armando was made a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion for his contribution to the country's art and culture. 

Armando is considered one of the most important post-war European artists, especially within the Dutch context, for his versatile, multidisciplinary practice, and for bridging the divide between the traditional abstract movements of the 1950s and the more conceptual movements of the 1960s. Today, his work occupies the permanent collections of the Netherlands Institute for Art History, as well as the country's Kröller‑Müller Museum, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Museum Jan van der Togt, Museum Flehite, Museum van Bommel van Dam, Museum Beelden aan Zee, and the Chabot Museum.