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If they were the notes of a piece of music, it would be a modern score: an apparent cacophony of sharp sounds. The sculpture 'Composition' by sculptor Pim van der Maas looks like a disordered stack of stainless steel boxes and plates. At first sight, the abstract geometric forms of the sculpture in Beethovenplantsoen are engaged in a chaotic fight with each other. But those who take a longer, closer look will see that Van der Maas has consistently worked with rectangles, triangles and squares and that he has indeed sought a balance. He created a balance with a visually equal weight of shapes on the left and right.

Composition' from 1968 is a fairly early sculpture by Van der Maas. The artist only began his sculpture studies at the age of 27 at the Free Academy in The Hague. Besides 'Composition', Van der Maas made various geometric abstract tubular constructions. However, his strict form language changed after the mid-1980s. In addition to metal, he started working in wood and his design became softer and rounder. Since then, forms reminiscent of a leaf, a feather or a wing regularly appear in his sculptures. But Van der Maas has never expressed himself in a figurative way, so we have to attribute these associations to the fantasy of the observer.

Composition' also stimulates the imagination. Even that of its maker. Initially, Van der Maas said that the sculpture was nothing. But twenty years later, in an interview with the Haagsche Courant newspaper, he wanted to say that it had something 'bird-like' to him: a bird on three legs with the construction of the slender body in the middle and two powerful heads at the top. In spite of the spiritual father's explanation, this sculpture offers a different perspective from different points of view, as if it were a three-dimensional cubist collage.