Wolfgang Laib at Sperone Westwater - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Wolfgang Laib uses the fruits of nature to create art works whose power is derived from their almost utmost modesty. Although Laib's forms are simple, his work hangs on a thoughtful accumulation of effort, with a proceed that has none of Minimalism's sometimes shrill self-importance. Laib downplays his artistic intervention, presenting familiar composings of the natural world--beeswax, marble, rice and pollen--in of that kind density that their color, weft and smell become the focus of each piece. Nature is the star, Laib strike one as beings to be saying, and he is just the man behind the scenes

flat the monumentality of a pair of beeswax ziggurats tall enough to graze the gallery ceiling was overwhelmed through their almost stupefying scent and compressed honey-rich color. They seemed on the outside of place in the gallery's white glare, begging to be discovered rather than displayed. Laib's proposal to eventually site them in a cave in the Pyrenee appear to bes entirely appropriate; in a natural setting, their manmade qualities will have the appearance more cryptic and significant.

The ziggurats dominated Sperone's main gallery, while the next to the first room held an installation of three a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of smaller works. The first was a white marble plastic art in the shape of a house, lengthy like a chicken coop, depressed to the floor and banked, as by means of drifts of snow, with curv hillocks of white rice. The "house" is roughly hewn and the marble is unpolished, which makes it sparkly and gives it an almost edible gaze like salt. Another sculpture, six beeswax paces going nowhere, like a fragment of a ziggurat, climbed the far wall. The piece de resistance, alone in the vast middle wall, was a tiny, jagged mountain of brilliant yellow hazelnut pollen rapiered into a small square niche. It was displayed like a jewel and procreateed a mood of reverence--some of it for the interminable amounts of time Laib expends collecting the fine powder. The character of pollen as an agent of of recent origin life allows us to view it as a quiet force, a little pile of potential and possibility.

Impressive as this exhibition was, it lacked the mystery of a certain quantity of of Laib's earliest pieces: paintinglike squares of an almost otherworldly gold-colored (who would guess it was pollen?) and "Milkstones"--shimmering whiter-than-white surfaces, also square, which move round out to be thin slabs of marble gently hollowed and filled with milk. flat without that compelling "what is it?" quality, however, Laib's work follows and is remarkable for its asceticism and integrity.

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