Honestly, I am transfixed by the artist Wolfgang Laib’s architecturally oriented yet transcendent sculptures made of beeswax in a new exhibition at the art gallery Sperone Westwater in New York City.
They’re all large enough that their size feels bodily and inhabited, though not by the person viewing the sculptures… or by anyone they can see. (One, for instance, is just over seven feet tall.)
All somewhat similar, they’re softly angular and rise evenly, generally rectangular in orientation and placed on one end of that three-dimensional rectangle. It’s like a tall building, without the orientation towards routine, familiar function that would define the buildings I could see if I went and looked out the nearest window.
Most of the sculptures’ actual, physical mass is dedicated to sending them upwards, with enough purpose that you get the sense that some kind of meeting of lurking, existential forces is imminent, or even already here.
They’re so evenly emphatic that you end up looking outwards, too. In their gentle imprecision, I start to feel now like what these very material creations look towards is their reverentially creative correlate in the immaterial, which no longer feels as distant as I think I’m still used to expecting. The act of tangible, physical, and structural creation is imbued in these artworks with so much power that — in the richly straightforward form it all takes here — it points you above, an “above” embedded within the original forms and continued outside of them.
I mean, each one of us is physical. And yet, we are alive! These sculptures capture something of those two forces meeting, and melding.
And that’s as these works also just sit quietly. They don’t assume or demand. They simply offer and wait. And in tandem with their offering, they ultimately linger between and across spaces — and between and across imaginable worlds.
They materialize an expanse at just startlingly close range. Though you can obviously walk around the pieces and see their specific, physical properties, I somehow also get the sense that they don’t end — not actually. And yet, they’re so… present. They were really, decisively there with me, when I was in the gallery.
In the interactions of their surfaces with both each other and you yourself as you stand among the group of these pieces gathered in the show, you begin to feel interactions of merely meeting and looking as so rich, so weighted, and so demonstrative and determinative. Creation is there, too! Even in the slightest thing.
As much as I might have expected the spiritual slant I felt in these artworks to come with an attendant focus on the divine or “above” as something beyond, I’m not sure anything in the universe these artworks established is way out above and beyond me, existentially speaking. Instead, a startling totality, and a surprising expanse… they meet you.
You get the sense when you’re looking at these sculptures that more will be created and experienced somewhere out there, and though we don’t decisively see it in visual specifics right here in front of us, its reach is felt. It too is, in some immaterial way, here.
The sculptural forms resist direct function, though they suggest it. They resist even direct interiority, considering there are window-like notches in their faces that don’t actually open up into anything. These sculptures ask us to just be here. To stand and gaze.
Their forms feel natural, as though emergent from the earth itself. The art, though, crosses even the boundaries of what’s biologically alive vs. what’s, well, not. The material that Laib used for these sculptures originates with biological life, but it itself is something distinct. The forms: they’re both sculpted and naturalistic at the same time.
On all these levels, the artworks slow down the process of cognizance and ask us to prioritize instead the visual. They ask us to look, and to feel the creation in the weight behind that looking.
Laib’s exhibition also includes photographs of spiritually significant places from wide-ranging cultures and works on paper that visually reflect the forms that appear on the faces of the beeswax sculptures. Called “Towers of Silence,” the exhibition continues through June 21. Thank you to the gallery.
