Wolfgang Laib

When Wolfgang Laib made "A Wax Room for a Mountain" (image 2) his silkscreen with yellow oilstick for Parkett 39 in 1994, he was exploring possibilities to create a wax room in nature, in a mountain.

He had previously done several wax rooms in museums starting in 1988 for Harald Szeemann’s exhibition "Zeitlos" at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Laib spent several years searching in the Pyrenees for a suitable place to install a Wax Room in the open. In 2001, seven years after his first study for his Parkett edition, he found the location he was looking for and built an actual outdoor Wax Room on the Roc del Maure near Marcevol. The nearly four-metre long and three-metre high chamber was hewn into the rock and the beeswax was applied direct to the stone by hand. 'La Chambre des Certitudes/The Room of Certitudes' is accessible only after a one-hour walk up the mountainside and it offers a very intense experience of the work and a view over to the Massif du Canigou.

Images 1 & 3-7 show views of the actual wax room "the room of certitudes" in the French Pyrenees

Wolfgang Laib’s edition
Parkett Vol. 39