Ritual plays a central role in all of Laib’s highly reductive art. He lives in a remote region of Germany’s Black Forest, communing with the natural world outside his house as a painter would work in his or her studio. During the spring and summer months he collects pollen, including dandelion, hazelnut, pine, buttercup, and moss varieties, from the fields surrounding his home.

He displays this laboriously gathered material in simple glass jars or sifts it through sheets of muslin directly onto the floor to create large, square fields of spectacular color.

He also molds the brilliantly pigmented dust into cones, as in The Five Mountains Not to Climb On. Though intimate in scale and intensely fragile, this hazelnut pollen sculpture alludes to the monumentality suggested by its title. The notion that there is infinitude in the infinitesimal is beautifully manifest in Laib’s spare but highly aesthetic practice.

Information via Sean Kelly Gallery

TAGS: art, art installation, beeswax, installation, pollen, Wolfgang Laib