Hans van Houwelingen

He created a public square paved in the pattern of a Persian carpet in a working-class neighbourhood in Utrecht. He removes statues from their pedestals to swap them for other objects, or puts them on columns of gigantic dimensions. 

Many of his designs are so controversial that they are not executed, such as his monument for the Turin Winter Olympics, which would have featured blood samples drawn from 2,500 athletes, or the ‘National Guest Worker Monument’ in which the government would have recognised the role of guest workers in Rotterdam's history. That is the consequence of his working method, which involves seeking out the tension between politics and society. Van Houwelingen provokes people to take a stand. 

But he has had an enormous amount of success, for example his ‘Blauw Jan’ on Kleine Gartmanplantsoen in the centre of Amsterdam, where his many bronze lizards have been cheering people up for two decades. Van Houwelingen was educated at Academie Minerva and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.