BERLIN, GERMANY.- The Buchmann Gallery in Berlin is pleased to announce the first gallery exhibition by Wolfgang Laib in Berlin, which will open on Friday, 17 November, 2006, from 6 to 9 pm. It will feature rice houses of marble and a work with pollen. In their archaic forms the rice houses recall reliquaries from the Far East. Wolfgang Laib thus adopts a traditional form but in the context of the exhibition he separates it from its common function in favor of its sculptural dimension. The marble rice houses are embedded in conic rice mountains of various sizes.

When the rice is piled into a mountain, the imagination associates it with a sense of an enormous potential in which each grain of rice bears within it an almost inexhaustible multiplication and life.

A mountain of hazelnut pollen, installed in a small wall niche, insistently reveals the potential of things. Small in scale but monumental in its power, the mountain remains intangible and unclimbable. Wolfgang Laib concentrates on a few selected materials in his works: pollen, milk, bee wax, marble, rice, and sealing wax. From each material he produces a series of works that unfolds, slowly but steadily. In 1975 he produced his first milk stones; in 1977 he began collecting pollen; in 1983 he worked with rice for the first time; in 1987 with bee wax and in 2002 with thitsi lacquer (Burmese lacquer). Wolfgang Laib never definitively brings any of his series to a close, as the presentation of several rice houses from various years in this exhibition demonstrates. The individual works and the series stand side by side, equally important and equally weighty. The artist is concerned not with innovation or formal developments but with continuity. His oeuvre is marked by forms and materials that recur in regular cycles.

Wolfgang Laib (b. 1950) numbers among those German artists who have been admired and respected over a long period. A retrospective that traveled to five museums in the United States closed at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in early 2003. Other recent exhibitions have been shown at the DePont Foundation Tilburg, the Centre Pompidou Paris, MACRO in Rome, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Fondation Beyeler Basel. The Reina Sofia Madrid is currently showing several large works by the artist at the Palacio de Cristal. At the sixth Site Santa Fe, curated by Klaus Ottmann, Wolfgang Laib is represented by three large works in Burmese lacquer.