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Wrestling: an ancient sport and also depicted for centuries. Depictions of wrestling naked men can be found in classical antiquity and by Michelangelo. The sturdy men's bodies, twisted limbs and tense muscles are a joy to behold and an excellent opportunity for the artist to show off his skills. The sculptures often symbolise inner conflict or the eternal fight with fate. With his 'Wrestlers', Rudi Rooijackers thus measures up to illustrious predecessors.

Rooijackers' image captures a typical moment. The upper figure holds the other's head firmly in his arms. The 'underdog' tries to push off his attacker with combined forces - he braces his left leg - as in the Roman statue of the mythical Laocoön, who tried to wrestle himself from the serpent's stranglehold.

The subject may be centuries old, but Rooijackers has turned it into a modern image through the abstraction and expressionist distortion of the body parts. For him, there was no distinction between abstract and naturalistic. What mattered was the plastic and spatial quality of the image. The Hague, for instance, has a sculpture from the same period that is very similar to the 'Wrestlers' in terms of forms and material, but in this case it is abstract: 'Composition'.

Both sculptures date from Rooijackers' 'baroque' period. There are various sculptures by him in the city, which clearly show how he developed his work for the public space. The famous 1952 granite sculpture 'Seated girl' in Scheveningen and a number of reliefs are linear and static. In the course of the sixties, he used materials that could be manipulated more easily, such as aluminium cement, and the sculptures became more dynamic, 'baroque'. Twenty years later, his style became calmer again. The search for the right form: an eternal struggle.