Wolfgang Laib

Wolfgang Laib - Far Eastern spirituality and St Francis of Assisi

Wolfgang Laib was born in Metzingen on 25th March 1950. The son of a doctor, he grew up in comfortable surroundings with an affinity for art, and it was the close friend and frequent guest of the family, the landscape painter Jakob Bräckle, who awakened young Wolfgang's interest in painting. Through Bräckle's guidance, Laib studied the work of Kasimir Malevich, which was still held by the architect Hugo Häring in Biberach at the time. Laib also intensively studied the teachings of Far Eastern philosophers, in particular Taoism and Zen Buddhism, but the greatest influence was that of St Francis of Assisi, whose traces can often be discovered in Laib's artistic work. Together with his family, the artist travelled through Europe to important architectural monuments from the Middle Ages, but also to Asia and above all India. Despite his great enthusiasm for art, Laib initially decided to study medicine.

Studying medicine led to the milk stones

Wolfgang Laib found it increasingly difficult to find the meaning he was searching for in his medical studies and the natural sciences. He began an additional degree in Indology, learnt Sanskrit and tried his hand at sculpting. When he saw his first sculpture, an ellipsoidal egg, which he named Brahmanda after the cosmic egg in Sanskrit, he decided not to work as a doctor but to pursue a career as an artist. Nevertheless, he completed his studies in 1974 with his dissertation, but then returned to his home village and devoted himself entirely to the visual arts. Inspired by his experiences as a medical student in various hospitals, Laib created his first milk stone and thus established his first category of work. Milkstones are rectangles of polished marble with a depression cut into their surface, which the artist fills with milk to create the illusion of a synthesis of the ephemeral and the eternal, of milk and stone.

Contemplative art made from fine pollen

Wolfgang Laib found the fulfilment he was looking for in working with natural materials. For many decades, he has spent the first half of the year, from spring to summer, collecting pollen from meadows and forests in the great outdoors. He uses this pollen to create his art, which he shows in a variety of ways in exhibition spaces all over the world: Sometimes scattered into whole fields with frayed edges through careful sieving, then piled into small mounds, and finally simply filled into jars. The objects are reminiscent of spatial installations and radiate a great contemplative calm that corresponds to the artist's deep spirituality. Wolfgang Laib has received prizes and awards for his art, including the Arnold Bode Prize in 1987 and the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture in 2015. Since the early 1980s, Laib has used other natural materials such as wax and rice, as well as Burmese lacquer and metals.

Wolfgang Laib lives and works today mainly in a small village in the south of Germany and also has studios in New York and India. He is married to the art restorer Carolyn Reep and has a daughter.