The immediate physical presence of the object radiates permanence and tranquility. The enormous weight of the stone is almost palpable.
With his most recent body of work, the ships, Wolfgang Laib creates powerful symbols of departure, transition, migration, and the journey of life. Since time immemorial, the ship has been a metaphor for life’s journey, the path of the soul, and the crossing of unknown waters. The granite ships also invite contemplation of the interconnectedness of nature, humanity, and time. They are a continuation of Wolfgang Laib’s exploration of the spiritual and essential underpinnings of his sculptural forms and the associated imagination and potentiality of things.
 
The artist has already explored the theme of ships in earlier series. In the mid-1990s, he created ships made of beeswax, in which the deck and hull were fused together. As sealed vessels, they remained somewhat elusive to viewers. The compact and archaic forms of these new ships, made of granite, are reminiscent of dugout canoes. Their sides are roughly hewn, occasionally featuring finely articulated, vertical ribs, while their upper surfaces are smoothly hollowed out into trough-shaped depressions. When placed outdoors, as they were until a few months ago under the banyan trees in the artist’s garden in India, they collect and hold rainwater. Here water and granite, liquid and solid, meet and merge, echoing the union of milk and marble in Wolfgang Laib’s Milkstone sculptures.
 
Wolfgang Laib’s ships are clear expressions of the artist’s uniting of a sensibility for material and form, rooted in Western minimalist art movements, with a spirituality informed by his interest in Eastern, particularly Indian, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion.
Provenance is directly from the artist, the work is in perfect condition.