For his recent show at the Fondazione Merz, German conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib (born 1950) fashioned an installation of hundreds of small rice mountains, a line of small mountains of pollen and a great mountain of beeswax. Laib elucidates the symbolism thus: "The pollen recalls the beginning and creation; the rice mountains and the beeswax Ziggurat and the bond of the sky with the earth."