Wolfgang Laib works with natural materials such as milk and rice and is perhaps best known for his floor installations of intense yellow pollen.
He painstakingly collects the pollen by hand every year from the woods and fields around his home in Southern Germany. Since 1987, he has also worked with natural beeswax, cast into blocks and built into chambers, dimly lit and suffused with the almost overpowering scent of honey and wax. Through its simplicity of form and materials, his work addresses ideas of purity and has a strong spiritual quality.
The beeswax chamber, which Laib assembled in Gallery 1 is an adaptation of a piece he made at the Henry Moore Studio Sculpture Trust and was supported by the Arts Council for England and the Gothe-Institut in London and Manchester.
