Wolfgang Laib
Frieze of Life

Sean kelly Gallery – 528 West 29th Street
ending Saturday, December 5 (that’s this Saturday!)

Trained to be a doctor, Wolfgang Laib found traditional medicine to be too limiting and felt it was art that could really heal.  Since 1975, Laib has worked with nature’s most fundamental materials and his preferred choices include milk, pollen, rice, and beeswax.  For the first time in 23 years, one of Laib’s iconic pollen installations is on view in NY.  

Living in a remote area of Germany’s Black Forest, Laib painstakingly collects pollen from the meadows around his home during the spring and summer.  He keeps the different varieties for example, hazelnut, buttercup, and dandelion in separate glass jars.  To create the installation, he slowly sifts the pollen on to the floor.  This work is made from 5 jars of hazelnut pollen.  For Laib, pollen symbolizes the origin of life.

Notice the intensity of color, the glow of light, and how the rectangular form appears to hover in space (because the pollen particles rise up into the air).  Can you feel its energy?  Take a whiff, often you can smell the pollen, too!

Also, check out Laib’s newest work Frieze of Life making its NY debut.  Shelves circle the room high on the wall and hold 400 hand-thrown clay pots filled with white ashes.  The ashes are collected from religious temples near the artist’s studio in India (where he lives part of the year).  A symbol of death and rebirth, the ashes also hold the hopes and prayers of the individuals who originally made the offerings.

To see Laib in action on his most ambitious installation to date with 20,000 tiny mountains of rice, 9 mountains of pollen, and a 20 foot-high ziggurat of beeswax, see: Wolfgang Laib at Fondazione Merz