Wolfgang Laib valuation

Wolfgang Laib was born in Metzingen in 1950, the son of a doctor, and grew up in a village in southern Germany; family journeys to India and South-East Asia in his teens shaped him lastingly. He studied medicine at the University of Tübingen from 1968 to 1974 and then turned to art. In 1975 he made the first Milkstone, a block of white marble with a shallow hollow filled with milk to the brim, so that it reads as a white surface. Since then he has worked with a few simple materials associated with nourishment and ritual: pollen from hazel, dandelion, buttercup and pine, collected by hand around his home each spring and summer and shown in glass jars or sifted onto the floor in luminous fields; rice, in small piles beside marble rice houses; and beeswax, in ziggurats and in rooms lined with wax. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1982, was in documenta 7 and 8, and in 2013 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed his largest pollen piece, about seven by eight metres, in its atrium. He received the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture in 2015.

Many of his works exist only when installed, by the artist or under his instruction, and pollen pieces, milkstones and rice works depend on materials renewed or supplied for each showing, so what changes hands is the object with its certificate and instructions: the marble of the milkstone, the jar of pollen with its date and plant, the rice house. Pollen should stay sealed and dry, beeswax softens in heat and marks easily, and marble chips. Drawings and works on paper also come up. Thaddaeus Ropac and Sperone Westwater have shown him.