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You make time tangible by keeping prints of something,' said sculptor Heppe de Moor in 'Contemporary Art' in 1979. For years, his work was dominated by mirror images and negatives. An example of this is his sculpture 'Het niets heeft de eeuwigheid' (Nothing has eternity) on the Zichtenburglaan. In the middle of an upright frame lies a large piece of Carrara marble turned into a boulder. The three prints around it immortalise the boulder. Should the boulder turn to dust, there are always the negatives - as with fossils that refer to a vanished world. Nothingness gets an eternal life through the imprint in stone.

De Moor, originally a painter, started making sculptures in the late 1960s. Concepts such as present, past and future occupied him. And, within that framework, transience. He tried to capture the passing of time. With the boulder, but also with halved tree trunks in concrete sheaths. If the wood rotted away, the permanent imprint of the bark in the concrete proved the existence of the tree. The sculptor was not so much concerned with the result (the concrete sculpture) as with the idea and the process. This also applies to the work of art in The Hague. For De Moor, the boulder and the imprints were no more than an aid to visualise his philosophical idea 'Nothingness has eternity'.

Around 1990 there was a change. I used to be more conceptual,' De Moor said a year before his death in the May 1991 issue of 'Magazijn', 'now more as a sculptor'. He had returned to the image as an object. He abandoned printing. The aesthetic form became more important than the idea. He designed abstract sculptures of interlocking straight and curved steel plates, sometimes combined with rough and polished stone. They form a premature conclusion to his oeuvre.