Armando, who was born as Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd, spent his early youth near Amersfoort where the German occupiers first erected a transit camp in 1938 and later the concentration camp Amersfoort. This experience influenced Armando's work considerably. Brutality, guilt, forgetting, life and death are the main subjects in his works. The artist studied art history and philosophy at the university of Amsterdam from 1949 to 1954. In 1958 Armando co-founded the 'Nederlandse informel groep' and was also the co-founder of its successor 'Gruppe Nul'. His early works adhere to the style of these groups, but also reveal a proximity to the German ZERO movement. Most of Armando's works are series. His works became increasingly object-focussed during the 1960s, when he began mounting objects onto boards and painting them in monochrome black. After spending three years studying the theory of early Romantic landscape painting he returned to the expressiveness of his early works. Armando was awarded a DAAD grant and moved to Berlin in 1979. There he painted his series 'Schwarze Fahnen' (Black Flags) which deals with the question of guilt and the relationship between the delinquents and the victims of National Socialism. At the same time he produced a number of works analysing the subject of life and death, in which landscape plays a significant role. The Neue Nationalgalerie was the first venue of a large touring exhibition of Armando's works in 1984. Armando first became interested in sculpture as an artistic medium in 1988. Since the beginning of the 1990s his work has also been influenced by the a preoccupation with music.