10 things about Carel Visser

Visser was born in 1928 in Papendrecht, near Dordrecht. His father ran a plumbing and water-tower construction firm. As a child, Visser played among the machines, worked with iron in the workshop, and drew animals in the meadows. The material that would later make him famous was already familiar to him from childhood.

He dropped out of an architecture program in Delft, and found art school a "waste of time." Over his life he earned exactly three diplomas: swimming, secondary school, and welding. With that last one, he would change Dutch sculpture.

From a young age, Visser cut pictures out of magazines: animals, cars, prehistoric figurines, viaducts, buildings. He pasted them together based on similarities in shape and texture. Those playful, associative scrapbooks may hold the key to his entire body of work.

At a time when most Dutch sculptors still worked in traditional materials like bronze, wood, or stone, Visser chose industrial iron and steel, delivered in beams and plates, shaping his sculptures with a welder and cutting torch. He left the welds visible, and let the "skin" rust or blacken it with burnt oil.

As a young boy, Visser watched storks mating on his neighbors' roof in Papendrecht. That spectacle of touching and releasing, coming together and drawing apart, never left him. His sculptures from the 1950s are full of birds, and the theme returns decades later.

After a trip through Sardinia and Sicily in 1957, Visser became fascinated by reflections: waves, mountains mirrored in water. From then on he built his sculptures from two forms that mirror each other. It looks simple, but creates maximum tension. Some of his finest works even seem to float because of that doubling.

From the 1960s onward, dozens of Dutch cities and companies placed Visser's work in public space, from Amsterdam to Zeewolde. As a sculptor of the postwar reconstruction era, he left his mark across the whole country.

In the 1960s Visser came up with the "salami concept": two identical iron beams, one sawn into eight equal pieces and shifted. How far can you push the balance before everything topples? With these provocative works he conquered Venice, London, and New York.

In the 1970s he broke radically with his rigid, mathematical style. His reasoning: Vietnam had shown that an army on bicycles could defeat a superpower. The era of strict order was over. The unpredictability of nature took its place.

One of the largest commissions Visser received later in life was a massive artwork for Schiphol Airport's new Departure Hall 3. He brought together every element of his oeuvre: nature, geometric-abstract forms, and his use of humble iron. Even the working model of Vliegende vis (Flying Fish), at 3.5 meters, is impressive.