Wolfgang Laib

In 1962 the family moved to a small village near to Biberach an der Riss, There his father had built a contemporary glass house of extreme and unique architecture set in a surroundings of meadows and forests.

Jakob Braeckle, a landscape painter of the region, became a close friend of the Laibs and conveyed his deep respect and love for art.

Through him the Laibs became personally acquainted with the paintings by Kazimir Malevich which were stored in Biberach by the architect Hugo Haering, having been later acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Through this friendship Laib became acquainted already in his early childhood with eastern culture and philosophies, together developing a very strong interest, especially in Lao-tse, Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

The family began to travel throughout Europe visiting those places where art, traces and treasures of the medieval culture are preserved.

Disillusioned with western medicine, he came to view the natural sciences, as well as most other modern thinking, as limited for their dependency on logic and the material world.

He returned to his village near Biberach, and in the intensity of his medical experience combined with all else, he intuited the creation of his first milkstones as an expression of all what he felt of at that time.

The pollen is presented in exhibitions in a variety of ways, best known as a radiant field sifted on the floor in a softened rectangular form providing a rich intensity of experience and emotion.

He lived and worked in Tribeca, a time during which he met Carolyn Reep, a conservator specialized in Asian art and antiquities, who would then after become his wife.

His selection of those materials are deeply meaningful, but they do not at all represent the limit of his intent in their essence; rather they serve as vehicles to by far greater complex ideas.