Wolfgang Laib City of Silence

The house form appears alongside the tower and ziggurat in the City of Silence installation. The act of creating the house out of beeswax is loaded with particular meaning for Laib. He says, ‘it is hard to describe what beeswax is for me, but I think it is a very spiritual material, and to use it as a “building” material, to “build a house”, led me (I hope) to a spiritual course’. 

The power of Laib's sculptural practice lies not solely in its synthesisation of form, but also in its appeal to sensorial experience. The title, City of Silence, anticipates the meditative quietude of the viewer's interaction with the unpopulated cityscape. The beeswax exudes an aromatic fragrance which recalls the medicinal properties attributed to the substance throughout history, connecting Laib's artistic interest in the human condition to his early experience training as a doctor in Germany.

These sensory elements are heightened in the artist's use of the material in his wax cells and corridors. First created in 1988, the interiors of these large-scale architectural spaces are lined with his signature beeswax and are typically illuminated by glowing, golden light bulbs. Installations such as the 40-metre-long wax corridor at Anselm Kiefer's vast studio complex in the South of France, La Ribaute, or on view at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, as part of their 2022 programming, envelop the individual in a mystical, immersive environment.

In many mythical and religious traditions, the boat is a symbol for journeys made between earthly and spiritual realms: it ferries mortal souls to the Underworld in Greek mythology, carries the sun and moon as they travel across the sky in Ancient Egyptian cosmology and delivers humankind to fecundity in sacred Hindu scripture. For Laib, ‘the open form of the little boats - inaccessible conveyances into another world - extends a spiritual invitation for us to strive, in reflection and contemplation, towards unknown goals’.

Rice is understood to be a source of sustenance that, in its ephemerality, is connected to cycles of birth and death. Each pearlescent grain holds the potential for germination and reproduction. Situated beneath the brass vessels, the rice offers the boats the material and symbolic energy to fuel their otherworldly journeys. 

The drawings are not conceived by Laib as preparatory material for his sculptures. They are rather a medium through which he is able to achieve combinations of architectural forms and motifs that would not be possible in the material world, for instance, placing ziggurats and ships inside mountains. These immaterial compositions offer an insight into the idiosyncratic worlds constructed by the artist in his examination of humankind's complex relationship with the material and spiritual.