Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective

Hardcover | 28.6 x 2.5 x 28.5 cm | 203 pp

Hatje Cantz | 2000 | 9781885444141

Wolfgang Laib’s breathtaking and quietly beautiful artwork draws on the ritual life he leads in and with nature and its processes of becoming and forgetting. His works are composed of purely natural materials, collected and processed by the artist himself: in the 70s, he created his first milk stone, and then moved on to sifting pollen into “colour miracles” or piling it into “insurmountable mountains”; in the 80s, he began to incorporate rice into his pieces; and towards the end of the decade he began working in beeswax.

This gorgeous retrospective of his work – with texts by Klaus Ottman and Margit Rowell, and interview between the artist and Harald Szeeman – offers us a key to fully appreciating his complex and transcendent body of work.