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Buildings with high towers, birds with party hats and dogs with crosses: the visual language of Joost van den Toorn is idiosyncratic, humorous and contains magical, mythical and grotesque elements. Since the end of the eighties, he has mainly made bronze sculptures. In them, he continually mixes Western and non-Western symbols from art and kitsch. Themes such as death, religion and sex recur regularly.

Van den Toorn's pedestal sculpture originated in Istanbul. The sculptor was staying there when the Balkan war broke out. The occasion was his amazement at the reports and images in the media, which were presented there from a different perspective than in the Netherlands. For example, what in the Netherlands is presented as a cruise missile attack, was seen there as genocide of Muslims.

Television in Istanbul showed fascinating images of a rocket that was fired horizontally at a minaret and then exploded. These television images formed the starting point for Van den Toorn's pedestal sculpture. Hence, for example, the tower. However, the form of the tower with the bell was derived from a funerary monument that he found, also in Istanbul, at a cemetery for dervishes (Islamic mystics of Sufism).

When it was finished, Van den Toorn gave the pedestal sculpture the title 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. This is a reference to the book of the same name written by Ernest Hemingway about the Spanish Civil War. This world-famous British author also looks at war from a different country and a different perspective.

You could say that Van den Toorn's plinth sculpture is the counterpart of 'Asylum', the sculpture he made in 1996 for the new court of justice in Rotterdam. That sculpture depicts a single-person cathedral, whereas 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' refers to a mosque. Although you cannot immediately tell from the form, both are places of reflection.