Thomas Houseago

If there is one word that describes Thomas Houseago’s large male figures then it is Conflict. Conflict with the world, but equally with themselves. They assume threatening poses, are ready to attack, but they are imbued with so much insecurity and vulnerability that the really big conflict will most likely never happen. This ambivalence is due to their bodies of rusty reinforcing bars and plaster, and their faces like a raw sketch on a sheet of paper. Such a wafer-thin and ephemeral identity means that they will never be the heroes that they would like to be. And yet they keep trying. Houseago has represented this trial of recently in bronze as well.

Houseago is showing a warrior in Sonsbeek Park: a metres tall bronze figure of a man in no way lacking in muscles and substance, but who has not yet managed to bring the world to its knees. He is still struggling too much with the problem of how he should actually make use of all this virility. Standing next to him are two aluminum masks symbolizing birth - when the struggle began - and death - the date at which he hopes to have decided the fight in his favor at least once.

The Guild of Hospitable Arnhem carried the masks in the Procession, in addition to four flat sculptures of a man with a raised sword, a man with a lowered sword, an owl and a snake. The latter two stand since time immemorial for wisdom and cunning, two qualities that, whatever the case, should be striven for.