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Kneeling on the pavement with his head under a paving stone, buried under a pile of books or hanging from a burning beam: with these black-and-white photos, the Icelandic-born artist Sigurdur Gudmundsson conquered the Dutch art world in the 1970s. The photographs show the artist in all kinds of absurd poses and incongruous situations. They are based on strange reflections and peculiar staging.

Ten years later, Gudmundsson no longer expresses himself in absurd, staged photographs. He found a more suitable medium in sculpture. Just as in painting, a major change took place in sculpture at that time. After years of being dominated by abstraction and minimalism, in the early 1980s there was room for figuration, the narrative and the tactile. The much talked-about exhibition 'The Great Poem' in the Grote Kerk in The Hague (1994) marked the transition from abstract, minimal sculpture to extremely free sculpture. The title of the exhibition is derived from a sculpture of the same name that Gudmundsson completed in 1981.

In his work, the Icelandic artist, who settled permanently in the Netherlands in 1970, unites his romantic vision of rugged nature, poetry and beauty with solid sculpture and a partly conceptual approach. The chosen materials are heavy, basalt, concrete, bronze with lighter accents like feathers or glass. The forms, a tower, a house, a boat, in which Gudmundsson presents these materials, are derived from the archetypal world of sculptures recognisable to everyone. He strives for sculptures that have a poetic and personal appeal on the one hand, but are also timeless and universal on the other.

Gudmundsson designed a head for the pedestal project. Normally this would have resulted in a one-piece sculpture. His plinth sculpture, however, is transparent because it is made up of bronze branches. Another archetypal form.