Museum Exhibition

MIT ANDEREN AUGEN Group show featuring Wolfgang Laib at Franz Marc Museum, Kochel

24 March—30 June 2024

Franz Marc Museum, Kochel, Germany

The exhibition "With Different Eyes" attempts to open up new perspectives with an unconventional approach. Karin Kneffel, Barbara Vinken, Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy and Julia Voss have been invited to highlight aspects of the Franz Marc collection that are currently preoccupying them in their academic and artistic work. This is not about a classic art-historical perspective, but about a view "from the outside".

Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, Director of the Franz Marc Museum, is organising a chapter on the spirituality of plants. At the centre is a work by Wolfgang Laib confronted with a painting by Paul Klee. These works show a mindful view of plants, foregrounding awareness of their spiritual power.

As self-contained thematic rooms, these micro-exhibitions are inserted into the permanent collection presentation and interrupt the usual tour with unexpected views and perspectives. Instead of a large exhibition with numerous loans, an attempt is made to gain new insights into "foreign" perspectives and unfamiliar impulses.

Wolfgang Laib creates sculptures and installations that seem to connect past and present, the ephemeral and the eternal. He employs simple, yet highly symbolic, organic materials that are usually associated with sustenance, such as pollen, milk, beeswax and rice. He arranges a limited number of elements in a formal way, following a rigorous process of conception and installation. Ritual plays a central role in the process of reduction and contributes to his spare aesthetic. Each year, during the spring and summer months, he collects pollen from the fields surrounding his home in a remote region of Germany's Black Forest, displaying this laboriously gathered material in simple glass jars or sifting it directly onto the floor to create large fields of spectacular colour.