Every house needs one of these:
"The Laib Wax Room, lined with fragrant beeswax and illuminated by a single bare light bulb, is the first permanently installed artwork at the Phillips since the Rothko Room in 1960. German artist Wolfgang Laib (b. 1950) installed the work in a space he helped to select in the original Phillips house. The Phillips Laib Wax Room is also the first wax room that Laib has created for a specific museum. Accommodating one to two people at a time, it offers a personal, meditative encounter.
To install the work, Where have you gone – where are you going?, Laib melted approximately 440 pounds—at a constant temperature to achieve a uniform golden hue. He used tools such as a spatula, spackle knife, electric heat gun, and warm iron to apply the wax, on the walls and ceiling of the 6-by-7-by-10-foot space.
For Laib, The Phillips Collection was a logical choice for the work because of its intimate, experiential character. Laib visited the Rothko Room for the first time in October 2011, and it left a profound impression. “A wax chamber has a very deep and open relationship to Rothko’s paintings,” he explains. To enter a wax room, Laib says, is to be “in another world, maybe on another planet and in another body.”
Laib began working in beeswax in 1988 and has used removable wax plates to create wax rooms for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988), the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (1989), the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands (1990), and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (1992). Laib went on to create beeswax chambers in nature—his first, created in 2000, is situated in a cave of the French Pyrenees and is accessible only by footpath; his most recent is on his property in southern Germany."
I'm definitely going to go visit this next time I'm in DC.
I actually made a bunch of beeswax candles and Buddhas this past weekend, so our house smells nicely of beeswax, though I am sure it is not the same as a beeswax room.
Kind of tempting to do this in a room in my house, though the flammability of it is a bit unnerving. Brings to mind that story of the Hartford waxed circus tent fire
"The Laib Wax Room, lined with fragrant beeswax and illuminated by a single bare light bulb, is the first permanently installed artwork at the Phillips since the Rothko Room in 1960. German artist Wolfgang Laib (b. 1950) installed the work in a space he helped to select in the original Phillips house. The Phillips Laib Wax Room is also the first wax room that Laib has created for a specific museum. Accommodating one to two people at a time, it offers a personal, meditative encounter.
To install the work, Where have you gone – where are you going?, Laib melted approximately 440 pounds—at a constant temperature to achieve a uniform golden hue. He used tools such as a spatula, spackle knife, electric heat gun, and warm iron to apply the wax, on the walls and ceiling of the 6-by-7-by-10-foot space.
For Laib, The Phillips Collection was a logical choice for the work because of its intimate, experiential character. Laib visited the Rothko Room for the first time in October 2011, and it left a profound impression. “A wax chamber has a very deep and open relationship to Rothko’s paintings,” he explains. To enter a wax room, Laib says, is to be “in another world, maybe on another planet and in another body.”
Laib began working in beeswax in 1988 and has used removable wax plates to create wax rooms for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988), the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (1989), the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands (1990), and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (1992). Laib went on to create beeswax chambers in nature—his first, created in 2000, is situated in a cave of the French Pyrenees and is accessible only by footpath; his most recent is on his property in southern Germany."
I'm definitely going to go visit this next time I'm in DC.
I actually made a bunch of beeswax candles and Buddhas this past weekend, so our house smells nicely of beeswax, though I am sure it is not the same as a beeswax room.
Kind of tempting to do this in a room in my house, though the flammability of it is a bit unnerving. Brings to mind that story of the Hartford waxed circus tent fire
Comments