Wolfgang Laib is a German artist who collects elements from Nature to make art, and invites contemplation and reflection of the beauty and simplicity of Nature.
In this video, he shows the process by which he installed a work of yellow luminosity that one has rarely the opportunity to see; it is his largest to date, the 18 x 21 feet “Pollen from Hazelnut”, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year.
The hazelnut pollen used for the installation had been consistently harvested by the artist in a slow and ritualistic process from around his home and studio in southern Germany for the past 30 years.
A former student of medicine and son of a physician, Laib abandoned his profession thinking that medicine was “too narrow”, focusing only on the body without the concern of the spiritual.
According to him, he uses elements of nature such as pollen, milk, rice, and beeswax as a way to “participate in the most beautiful things in the world, which I could never create”.
“I think that in most cultures, artists were not considered as individuals who had to invent or create something. They were participating in the whole, in the universe. So, for me, the sky is much more important than trying to make a painting that is a symbol of the sky. For me, it’s the pollen itself- that is the miracle in which I participate in my daily life when I collect the pollen. It’s not mine”. So, authenticity, for him, is “the collecting, the putting together, the sharing”. Other materials that he has used include marble, wood and stones.
*Filmed and Edited by BUNKER. Produced by The Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition “Wolfgang Laib”.
