The first time I encountered work by Wolfgang Laib I almost walked past it. The piece consisted of several uniformly-sized sulphur-yellow piles of some substance, each only a very few inches high.

Some artwork you look at and you get immediately. Others don’t click until you read the label for some sort of clarification that can turn into one of those OMG aha moments. Turns out the little yellow piles were made of pollen that the artist had collected.

The piles were small, but anyone who grows plants knows that coming up with that quantity of pollen would take days, weeks, maybe longer, and bespoke a certain kind of focus (or utter obsessiveness). It’s an artwork that highlights the importance of the work’s materials as well as the processes and lifestyle the artist needs to commit to in order to make the work.

The Five Mountains Not to Climb On (Die fünf unbesteigbaren Berge), 1984. Hazelnut pollen, height: approximately 2 3/4 inches [ source ]

Left: The cover of the catalog, Wolfgang Laib Eine Retrospektive.

Another room in that exhibit I attended had one of his stunning squares, also made of pollen, laid out on the ground. Minimalism has strongly influenced how subsequent artists approach what they do, and making uniform piles or geometric shapes of something can verge on cliché. But the edges of the pile were a little soft, with the pollen defying staying exactly within the margins of the square, and the softened edges made the square seemed to dematerialize and float, like the rectangles in Rothko’s paintings.

Assertive in color but intensely fragile in nature, the work showed a reverence by the artist to his materials. But at the same time it required a respect from the viewer to at least not do something as blunderingly insensitive as to walk through the artwork. Unfortunately, before that La Jolla exhibition closed, someone had done just that.