'Elements', Tax Office and Regional Employment Office, Zutphen 1972-1974
'I react to the space and view it from the image' Frans de Wit

In 1972, De Wit submits a concept to the art committee. After he receives the commission, it takes him one and a half year to make the sculpture in Corten steel. De Wit says: ‘you start something, then the material comes, and the form starts to increasingly impose itself until the point you can’t ignore it anymore. And when he’s s gone [the statue], I get a sense of relief.’ After a year and a half of intensive work, the sculpture is referred to as a personage, as a ‘he’.

De Wit extracts the image from what he envisions at the onset, but also from the material and the manufacturing process. In this case he transforms 8 tonne of Corten steel into resilient elements that seem to depict an unparalleled force of nature in an 8 meter high and 8 meter long sculpture.

Prior to completion, his wife notes in the photo album: ‘It is like a frozen sea, or at least elements from nature that have been in motion and have suddenly remained still in that that moment.’