Presented by Thaddaeus Ropac

The film, commissioned by the Museo Novecento and produced by MUS. E, was made at the time of the exhibition of the same name, curated by Sergio Risaliti, which involved places of extraordinary historical and artistic value such as the Museum of San Marco (Polo Museale della Toscana), the Chapel of the Magi (Palazzo Medici Riccardi), the Rucellai Chapel (church of San Pancrazio, Marino Marini Museum) and the Pazzi Chapel (Monumental Complex of Santa Croce), in a relationship played out between the visibility of art and the invisibility of the spirit, linking Renaissance magnificence with contemporary artistic research.

The film, narrated by the artist himself, retraces the phases of preparation and development undertaken during the ambitious project that has created a close dialogue between the city’s past and the contemporary research of the German master. The art of Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, Benozzo Gozzoli and Beato Angelico, in dialogue with minimalist works of great symbolic significance, made with natural elements such as pollen and beeswax, uncovers a relationship played out entirely on sensitivity and subtle perception between sculpture, architecture and nature, uniting the East with the West in his daily life and creative practice. In a time like ours, in which the whole of humanity is looking for a way to overcome the pandemic and the difficult relationship between man and nature, Laib’s art gives a new perspective on the redefinition of humanism in a way which is no longer exclusively anthropocentric.