Carsten Höller (born December 1961 in Brussels, Belgium) is a German artist. He lives and works in Farsta, Stockholm, in Sweden.[1] Today, he also shares a house in Ghana with colleague Marcel Odenbach.[2]
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Born to German parents working for the European Economic Community, Höller grew up in Brussels.[3] He holds a doctorate in agricultural science, specializing in the area of insects' olfactory[4] communication strategies, from University of Kiel;[5] the title of his dissertation is "Overwintering and hymenopterous parasitism in autumn of the cereal aphid Sitobion avenae (F.) in northern FR Germany".[6] Only during the late 1980s did he first begin making art. However, he has been working as a research entomologist until 1994.[7]
Höller came to prominence in the 1990s alongside a group of artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel who worked across disciplines to reimagine the experience and the space of art.[8] In his work, Höller creates situations which question familiar forms of perception and allow exhibition visitors to experiment on themselves, often inviting the public's active participation in so-called “influential environments”[9]. In their form, Höller's works are occasionally reminiscent of scientific laboratory arrangements, allowing the viewer to become the subject of an experiment.[5] His work since the early 1990s has encompassed buildings, vehicles, slides, toys, games, narcotics, animals, performances, lectures, 3D films, flashing lights, mirrors, eye-wear and sensory deprivation tanks.[10]
Among Höller's well known works is a series of corkscrewing tubular metal slides made from 1998 that is an ongoing project.[11] Not only are slides a practical means of transportation, but the act of sliding down one produces a loss of control, inducing a particular state of mind related to freedom from constraint. His most famous slides include that made for the offices of Miuccia Prada in Milan (2000) and the first slides made for the Berlin Biennale in 1998.[12]
Höller's artistic practice reflects the interaction between work and public in various ways, often chemically analyzing the nature of human emotions. His avid interest in duality harks back to the start of his career, when Höller designed a series of works with the Rosemarie Trockel, actually doubling himself up in another creator. Other examples include an exhibition in which Höller and Maurizio Cattelan presented a series of identical works at two different Paris galleries, removing all differences of style or ownership[13]; and his exhibition "One Day One Day" (2003) at the Färgfabriken in Stockholm, where two works were shown opposite each other and changed every day without the public’s knowledge.[14] His explorations often involve playful elements such as in Sliding Doors (2003), a series of electronic sliding doors with a mirrored surface through which the audience passes in a seemingly endless passage.[15] In 2008, Höller installed The Revolving Hotel Room, a hotel room for two, as part of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.[16] At his 2010 show at the Hamburger Bahnhof, visitors could paid 1,000 euros ($1,370) for a night on an exposed circular platform perched above 12 castrated reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies.[17] In Psycho Tanks (2011), visitors float weightlessly on the surface of a sensory deprivation pool, providing a strange out-of-body experience [18] Equally encouraging visitors' participation, Pill Clock (2011) is an aperture which emits a white pill into a growing pile of the same every 15 seconds.[19]
Mushrooms became a regular feature of Höller's work from 1994.[20] He has since realized several works with the fly-agaric mushroom, including the Mushroom Suitcase series (2001/2002) and the Upside Down Mushroom Room (2000), which was shown in 2005 at MOCA in Los Angeles. His fly-agaric replicas are large-scale and often spin or hang upside down from the ceiling. The artist has also created photographic works based on the fly-agaric, entitled Mushroom Print (2003) and Soma Series (2008).[21] In a series of giant sculptures of funghi – Giant Triple Mushrooms (2010) –, half of each sculpture replicates the look of random fungi; half, a very specific species: the large red-and-white fly agaric fungus, Amanita muscaria, occurring wild in Eurasia. A fungus with psychoactive, hallucinogenic properties, it was used, it is thought, by Siberian shamans as an intoxicant.[22]
In 2008, Höller opened the restaurant/nightclub "The Double Club" in London in collaboration with Germano Celant and Fondazione Prada for a six-month period. 50% of its profits were donated to a charity that generates specialised projects to help abused women and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[23] As in The Double Club and JapanCongo, the African continent has been the subject of his Flicker Films series (2005), in which flickering images of performances by African dance groups at a concert in Kinshasa are projected.[24][25]
Carsten Höller had his first solo exhibition, curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen, in Cologne in 1993. That same year, he was invited to Aperto '93 at the Venice Biennale. Höller's works have since been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2003), Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille (2004), MASS MoCA, (2006), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2008), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (2010), Rotterdam. Höller was included in Documenta X (1997), where he created Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen with Rosemarie Trockel. In 2006, he conceived "Test Site" for The Unilever Series at Tate Modern, London, and represented Sweden (with his wife Miriam Bäckström) at the 51st Biennale di Venezia.[26] In 2011, Höller curated "JapanCongo" at Le Magasin (Centre National d'Art Contemporain) in Grenoble and at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, a show of contemporary African and Japanese art from the private collection of Jean Pigozzi.[27][28] In 2011, the New Museum mounted Höller's first New York survey exhibition.[29].
Höller is represented by Esther Schipper, Berlin; Casey Kaplan, New York; Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles; and Air de Paris, Paris.
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