Multiple works by Wolfgang Laib installed [Left to right: Ziggurat, Staircases]

German sculptor Wolfgang Laib is well known for creating objects of simplicity and purity, imbued with the transgres sive power to temporarily suspend reality: rectangular slabs of polished white marble with barely perceptible depressions on their upper surfaces that the artist fills with milk; fields of yellow or orange pollen that he sifts onto the floor, small house-shaped wax sculptures surrounded by grains of rice; and life-size rooms lined with beeswax or Burmese lacquer. Laib never received any formal art education. The son of a physician, he studied medicine but never practiced it. In 1972, after returning to Germany from a three-month stay in India to study the quality of the local drinking water, Laib discovered a large black rock, about three feet in length, in the country- side near his home. Inspired by the simple shapes of objects used in everyday life as well as in religious ceremonies he encountered in India, he brought the rock home and set to work carving it into a perfect ovoid. During that time he realized that he was dissatisfied with medical science, which he felt addressed human needs only imperfectly, and he turned to art instead. Laib's work is characterized by a deep relationship with nature and a com- mitment to the purity and simplicity he finds both in his native Protestantism and in Eastern philosophies. He has established an artistic vocabulary of timeless forms infused with his knowledge of both Western and Eastern spiri- tuality. The artist is especially inspired by the temple altars of southern India- a place he considers his spiritual home-replete with their offerings of flowers and food and their portable bronze deities. Produced between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, these figures are integral to the daily Indian rituals and ceremonial processions, and are bathed, clothed, and given offerings of incense and food, including milk, which is often poured over them. Both Laib's milkstones and his rice houses, he says, are inspired by these obser- vances and cultural practices.Laib still spends part of each year with his family in southern India, where he has just built a house. India continues to have a profound effect on his life and work. He han also explored the aesthetic practices of Turkey, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Tibet. His experience of non-Western cultures has helped him to conceive of art in a radically individual way. For Laib, art is a process that involves simplicity and reduction. It is about seeing something large in some thing small: a three-inch-high mountain of pollen can be as monumental as an 18-foot-high beeswax ziggurat. Or, as he orice told me, "It is about the least, which is also the most. To equate Laib's phenomenological reduction with ascetic denial, however, would be to miss the point. His pursuit of simplicity as a means of order relates to cultural practices and religions around the world: Japanese Zen Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi, and American Quakerism. The sensibility of simplicity can be invoked through a variety of rituals-Japanese bathing practices, for exam- ple-while rhythmic repetitions and universal forms (squares, circles, spheres. triangles, cones, pyramids) are used everywhere to instill a sense of structure, discipline, and repose. The eighteenth-century Japanese painter Gibon Sengai, for instance, an itinerant Zen priest, illustrated the universe with noth- ing more than a circle, a triangle, and a square. Beginning in 2002, Laib has expanded his vocabulary to include sculptures made from a natural resin native to Myanmar and refined from the sap of the Southeast Asian Thitsi tree, which grows in the Burmese forests. When tapped, the rubber-like sap is straw-colored but quickly turns a glossy black. Laib spent several months in Burma learning the laborious technique of apply ing and coloring the lacquer. He only uses natural black lacquer or the tradi tional red coloring, which is produced by adding powdered cinnabar-a bright red mineral consisting of mercury sulfide to the lacquer sap. This mix- ture is known in Myanmar as hinthaba. It is applied by hand on top of the rich, glossy black lacquer surface. Thus far, Laib has created several staircases and ziggurats, covered with either black or red Burmese Thitsi lacquer. He also created a small lacquer room, which was shown recently at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. Along with pollen, wax, or milk, the lacquer extends Laib's art into an intermediate domain pertaining to neither materiality nor form. Instead, this work is located in what I defined elsewhere as a "spiritual materiality": a renewed involvement in the question of being, transcen dence, and the social by way of its materiality. For Laib, art is an act of participation and sharing-participating in nature and sharing that experience with others. Laib's works are not merely visual experiences but serve as his contributions to social and spiritual change. For him, the spiritual reality of the work is embedded in its materiality-the two cannot be separated: "I have always had this almost naive belief that a pollen piece and milkstone contain a message that could change the world." Laib continues to create milkstones, pollen fields, and wax or lacquer objects in forms virtually unchanged since the mid-1970s. His art resists clas- sification into separate, chronologically sequential bodies of work. By the standards of most Western artists today, the pace of Laib's production is slow to the point of being artisanal; his methods are reclusive, circular, repetitive, and, in certain respects, ritualistic. Alluding to this cyclical practice, Laib once referred to pollen as "a detail of infinity."
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.