Wolfgang Laib City of Silence Thaddaeus Ropac, London 8 September – 3 October
Made from beeswax – glistening ochre yellow and milk-coee brown and filling the gallery with its mellow, vaguely bitter aroma – the City of Silence (2020) is a loose gathering of softly cartoonish gabled houses, tall thin towers and stepped triangular forms, somewhere between pyramids and ziggurats. Primal archetypes of human architecture, perhaps also devotional, Wolfgang Laib’s settlement appears uninhabited. Rectangular windows and doors open onto dark interiors. And yet, as the other forms shaped in profile of a human head and shoulders suggest, these structures might be dwellings of a more spiritual kind, attentive and meditative at once.
Laib’s long attachment to non-western spiritual traditions, his fascination with ancient architectural form and his use of organic substances connoting plenty and fecundity (pollen, rice, wax, milk) make for work that hovers between a sense of the archaic and of what is historically enduring. It’s not much enamoured of modernity, but it retains a commitment to tropes of civilised human being – building, raising, cultivating, travelling. Along Thaddaeus Ropac’s long marble hall, on dark wood shelves, a line of shining boats rest on mounds of rice, the boats cut and folded from thin bright brass sheet (Untitled, 2011–12).
Laib’s forms are crafted distillations of human mythos, tensed between nature, spirituality and the secular space of contemporary art. But while the making of these objects from natural stu can sometimes seem arbitrary and performative – why make the buildings specifically from beeswax, other than because this is one of Laib’s ‘signature’ materials? – that ambiguity doesn’t extend to the many works on paper shown together in an upstairs gallery. Pencil and oil pastel trace and fill out zigguratlike towers, in sunny yellows, vivid reds and ghostly whites, a recurring motif among other hieroglyphlike graphic forms – triangles, archways (or perhaps headstones) and a device that suggest a flaming bowl – mapped in grids and more complex patterns. Photographs of tombs in Turkey and shrines in India, hung alongside, insist on the drawings’ roots in Laib’s New Age globetrotting. But the drawings themselves, in their abstracting, platonic simplicity and their absorbing patterning and symmetry, remind us of the connection between thinking, imagining and making that comprises the enduring ideal of human society in its world.