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The artist Gijs Assmann seems to be a jolly good fellow. At least, that is the first impression you get when you see his colourful sculpture for the sculpture gallery 'The he and the she and the is of it': two intertwined, tangled figures, one upside down, the other with a sort of jute head. The whole thing looks clownish, yet it has something wry. The pose of the figures is very uncomfortable: is this a struggle or are 'the he and the she' in knots? Or do they form an absolute unity, 'the is of it'?

Looking at Assmann's oeuvre, one is struck by the playful way in which he depicts such heavy themes as death, religion and sex. Hangings, dead trees and skulls constantly recur in his works on paper. Assmann sees the creation of works of art as 'a way of dealing with death, and of representing the melancholy and helplessness that arise from the tension between true happiness and inevitable failure'. The artist depicts human shortcomings in a grotesque way by referring in his sculptures to medieval sculptures such as monstrous gargoyles, comic strips or pornography.

In Assmann's work, themes from Christian iconography and motifs from art history are transformed into apparently amusing, but in reality often pitiful, images. A man with a rope that returns from his mouth to his body at the place of his sex via all kinds of empty attributes, a Pieta that turns into a sexually charged image because Mary and Christ are presented as two lifeless inflatable dolls. Assmann's work fits into the tradition of vanitas still lifes. Mensch, remember to die' warned his predecessors. Assmann no longer moralises: he seduces with beautiful images, but the message is possibly all the harsher.