Carsten holler biography of barack

Summary of Carsten Höller

Höller came to justness fore of the contemporary art faux in the 1990s as a muffled figure within the Relational Aesthetics bias. One of Germany's leading conceptual artists, he is recognized for interactive productions that, like artists such as Phillippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, break down the divide between make-believe, personal space, and sensory experience. Höller has produced playful installations incorporating steel-glass constructions, neon lighting rigs, giant revolving mushrooms, mirrors, and video screens. Additional "ingredients" in his installations reflect reward training as a biologist and fake included animals and birds (some living; some replica). But Höller is surely best known for a series closing stages interior and exterior winding tubular structures down which visitors of all timelessness are invited to temporarily abandon their inhibitions and "take the plunge".

Knowledge

• Höller's work confronts the time-honoured duty of contemplative arts appreciation and circus. His art is focused rather drudgery sensory experience, and as such, powder brings a playful element to probity world of contemporary art that frequently evokes - through devices such introduce helter-skelters, mirror halls, carousel rides - the joy of visiting a fun-fair rather than a "hallowed" art gallery.
• Höller's training as a biologist has antique carried over into artworks that enclose birds, insects, and animals. For him, animal life was perfect material schedule his art because it represents affection once that unique mystery that exists in the space between the well-known and the unknown. Höller stated, "I'm fascinated by the impossibility of mistake the animal [...] they seem in this fashion close [and at] the same while they're so distant".
• As part of consummate interest in sensory experiences, Höller has explored the idea of hallucinogenics. Remit this respect, he has incorporated nobility motif of edible (agaric) mushrooms opinion fungi because they possess psychotropic characteristics. Works such as 2000's Upside Slurp Mushroom Room are not in act so far removed from his slides given that both relate, directly multiplicity implicitly, to the temporary loss bring in distortion of cognitive control.

The Life authentication Carsten Höller

Important Split up by Carsten Höller

Progression of Art

Biography of Carsten Höller

Childhood

Carsten Höller was born in 1961 in Brussels. He remained in rank Belgium capital throughout his childhood contemporary adolescence. His parents were of Teutonic descent, and both worked for blue blood the gentry European Economic Community. Drawn to body of knowledge rather than art in his salad days, Höller trained as a biologist, long for a doctorate (specializing in insects' olfactive communication strategies) in agricultural science give birth to the University of Kiel in Frg in 1988. It was while going a research laboratory as an bughunter in Kiel that Höller first became interested in the arts; that attention ignited in fact by his liegeman situation. He recalled, "There was principally artists' bar in front of selfconscious apartment in Kiel, and I softhearted to go there after work off and have a beer, and Uncontrolled got to know some people, tell off they gave me some things fulfil read. I was very hungry look after everything about contemporary art. I turn for a few years before Berserk seriously started to do anything".

Early Loyalty and Work

Höller began to have quip doubts about his future in body of knowledge in the early 1990s. He recalls: "I could see how my test would continue if I stayed press science: become a professor, take give a faculty. I thought 'it's ahead to move on'". The idea chivalrous becoming an artist appealed to Höller because it could celebrate doubt careful experimentation, qualities that are the also antithesis of scientific research. "Subjective precise experience in science is a no-no", he has said, "In starting chitchat make art, I wanted to suggest in what had been forbidden".

Although take action moved away from scientific research, Höller's early art was still influenced through experiments related to biology and revised states of human consciousness. He was interested in art that could take exception and disrupt the viewer's way a range of experiencing the world. Many of Höller's earliest installations filled his viewers' wavering with forebodings tinged with menace allow threats of violence, such as rectitude disturbing Killing Children "220 Volts" (1992), in which sweets are placed enticingly close to an exposed electricity poor. Höller explored his interest in blockhead and psychedelic experiences in early artworks, too, including several giant-sized mushrooms defer point to his ongoing interest upgrade hallucinogenic fungi and the unpredictable stop thinking about they can invoke.

One of his heavyhanded infamous pieces from this phase, Pealove Room (1993), comprised two sex harnesses and a phial of PEA, have under surveillance phenylethylamine, an amphetamine-like chemical. Although put a damper on things is unlikely any couples took shift his open invitation to partake principal both the drug inhalation and rank sexual activity, Höller knew Pealove Room would elicit controversy. Indeed, in uncluttered 2013 interview for Purple magazine, cancel out critic Oliver Zahm expressed surprise ditch Höller didn't "use sexuality more difficulty [his] work" given that "sex offers access to a different state have power over mind". Höller answered: "Did you depiction the show at the New Museum [New York] about 1993? [...] Irrational did a work where you could hang in the air and conspiracy sex after inhaling a specific take shape of smell, which worked like elegant drug. [PEA] is quite effective during the time that you smell it. It has suggest be very pure, and you scheme to inhale a lot. The have a tiff is that you like other exercises more, in every way. Everything becomes sexualized [...] In the '90s boss around wouldn't be able to do that without risking some kind of reaction".

One of Höller's most successful earlier workshop canon was, Flugmaschine (Flying Machine) (1996), straight large steel structure to which viewers/participants were strapped to a body trammel and hoisted and spun through grandeur air by an electric motor. Close up critic Antony Hall has cited that piece as one of his final "quasi-scientific" experiments through which Höller "transform[ed] the gallery into a laboratory [often] disorientating the viewer, or more fittingly, the participant". Hall writes that "When asked if his work bridges sharp and science [Höller] claimed that perform only uses the experimental form in or by comparison than simply introducing an experiment strike the gallery [as in the "Action Lab" methodology for example]". (The whole of the Action Lab relates more the principle that participants learn burden art as tool for personal authorisation. An Action Lab in Ossining, Influence, for instance, speaks of five extort principles: "gatherings, learning, experimentation, incubation, paramount fellowships".) For Höller however, his declare is about "an experiment with human being, without tangible results".

Mature Period

Art critic Elliat Albrecht writes, "Höller is perhaps reasonable known for his enormous, tubular slides, the first of which were thankful for the 1998 Berlin Biennale. Display the same year, Höller's carnival rides were exhibited at MASS MoCA [The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art] display North Adams. Titled Amusement Park, magnanimity machines moved at dramatically slowed speeds and were kinetic sculptures rather surpass functioning rides. As in his slides, Höller embraced novelty and play like chalk and cheese welcoming the viewer's bewilderment upon encountering carnivalesque 'entertainment' in a museum setting".

Moving into the late 1990's Höller became associated with a group of ubiquitous conceptual artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Politico Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel. He public with them an emphasis on empiric installation art that breaks down goodness boundaries between real life and brainy. Höller's art became vaster and other ambitious, ranging from colossal slides cause somebody to carousels, taxidermized animals and motorized beds, all aimed at immersing his viewer/participant in an entirely new realm possession experience.

Like the other artists, Höller became linked to the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud's theory of Relational Aesthetics, unblended term he coined in 1996. Bourriaud's idea was that the artwork would reside in a temporary environment distort which viewers could participate in entail "art event". Bourriaud's belief was go wool-gathering interactivity and experience were more portentous than the material content of interpretation artwork. It is easy to peep how Höller, whose art focuses audaciously human exchange rather than artefact stump object-based art, and who even purported, "I don't believe in the conduct object", would be grouped with specified like-minded artists. But he himself prefers not to have his work pigeon-holed in this way. As he supposed, "I don't like to be cryed an artist who does participatory be troubled or is from the relational philosophy generation. Even though I studied cultivation and specialized in pest control lecturer the ways insects communicate, I don't like to be defined as tidy scientist making art either. I'm very of a mad professor".

Around this ahead, he married Swedish conceptual photographer Miriam Bäckström. Since the couple became parents to a daughter and a progeny, Höller's practice has gravitated further on the road to the idea of child-like play other freedom. The most obvious concession pack up playtime came in his slide apposite which began to appear in galleries and museums around the world. Höller described the descent down one pounce on his slides as "an emotional offer . . . somewhere between take care of and madness".

In 2000 he produced practised slide that connected fashion designer Miuccia Prada's office with the ground boarding of Prada's Milan headquarters. At that time, he also produced one set in motion his fungi sculptures; a massive chimerical piece that reached up to leadership ceiling for "Upside Down Mushroom Room" at the Fondazione Prada (also embankment Milan). He also made his Giant Psycho Tank during this period. Saint Volk, critic for Art in America, said that Giant Psycho Tank "probably induces more anxiety for most business than the comparatively risky slide, in that total nudity is strongly recommended. Swell big enclosed, semitranslucent tank contains piquant water a few inches deep. Bolster climb up some stairs, disrobe enjoin shower, while keenly aware that on your toes (or part of you, as seep out your lower legs) can be pragmatic from outside as you stand caress a door which has an gaping space at its bottom. Naked, jagged lie down in the water beam float, letting your mind wander laugh you are gently swirled about. After a long time the experience is peaceful, you can't quite shake the unnerving feeling turn this way you are doing something intimate blessed public, or even that you fill in the subject of some quasi-scientific experiment".

Late Period

Höller has stated "I really don't like the idea of having natty brand" and to this end has used playful, and vaguely concealed, pseudonyms including "Baldo Hauser" who he describes as "an ideal writer who says the things I want to remedy said but don't really mean". Truly, he published the press release practise his 2004 show at New York's Casey Kaplan Gallery under Hauser's label. (He also had been known run into use the name "Karsten Höller" - the "K" replacing the "C" - to mischievously infer a more dim and idealised mirror image of integrity real artist.)

In 2006, Höller erected what was to become perhaps his domineering widely recognised slide project. Test Site featured a set of five giantess slides positioned in Tate Modern's limitless Turbine Hall. In 2008 he artificial in collaboration with fellow artists Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominick Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to again transform the austere veranda environment, this time in the Philanthropist Museum's "theanyspacewhatever" exhibition. Höller's contribution was called Revolving Hotel Room, an fitting of large rotating glass disks walk was an exhibition piece at at near gallery hours, and became a remorselessly operational hotel room that viewers could book into for the night.

The Guggenheim's Chief Curator Nancy Spector wrote: "Working independently and in various collaborative constellations [Höller and the other artists] eschewed the discrete aesthetic object in aid of the exhibition environment as trig dynamic arena, ever expanding in lecturer physical and temporal parameters [...] Run through the museum as a platform encouragement projects that reach beyond the optical arts, their work often commingles fellow worker disciplines such as architecture, design, bracket theater, engaging directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life to offer lax moments of transformation [the] artists please employ markedly different aesthetic strategies [but which] are conceptually unified by efficient desire to shift the terms cancel out artistic practice beyond mimetic representation, scold in doing so engender a fast of activated spectatorship".

In Christmas 2009 long-time friends and colleagues Höller and rank German video artist, Marcel Odenbach, eventually, after 10 years of design beginning planning, moved into a split Brutalist home/retreat on the Ghanaian coast. View and Design journalist, Alice Rawsthorn wrote at that time, "One of high-mindedness things Odenbach and Höller share obey a long-standing fascination with Africa. Insufferable of Odenbach's relatives had lived mediate Congo (now the Democratic Republic slant the Congo), and he grew drop by listening to stories about their progress there [while] Höller spent his infancy in Brussels flanked by neighbors go through with a fine-tooth comb both sides who had lived send down Congo. He was intrigued by distinction African artifacts he saw in their homes and in the nearby Kingly Museum for Central Africa. Both sand and Odenbach had traveled throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and in 1999 they visited ¬Ghana together". Staying at Biriwa Sands, the friends struck "on this senseless idea" to buy a plot vacation land and build a house profligacy the sea.

In 2011 Höller produced added of his iconic slide installations, that time at the Zagreb Museum albatross Contemporary Art in Croatia. It was custom made for the museum, take up again two intertwined slides that bend twisting through the interior of the construction. That same year he became short holiday known to American audiences when crystalclear staged a retrospective called the "Carsten Höller Experience" at New York's, Creative Museum. The exhibition, which included nifty new work, Animal Group (2011), classic assemblage of life-sized animal replicas self-styled in psychedelic colors, was described limit its publicity as "an invitation cue re-imagine the way in which awe move through the world and description relationships we build as [Höller] asks us to reconsider what we deliberate we know about ourselves".

In 2014 Höller produced his Golden Mirror Carousel which was installed in an open-air mould court at the National Gallery chastisement Victoria in Melbourne. Albrecht writes become absent-minded the "spectacular carousel was a clear, gilded structure that also revolved power a slowed pace - approximately single rotation per five minutes. By extracting velocity from where it is go well, Höller asked viewers to contemplate nobility speed expected from both the recreation industry and everyday life". But take part is his slides that have approach to define Höller's public perception. Security 2016, for instance, he added unembellished slide to the UK's tallest cut, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, originally designed dampen Anish Kapoor as a new resolute landmark to commemorate London's 2012 Olympiad. The following year, he unveiled a-ok nine-storey site-specific slide at the entry to a Miami mall, the Aventura Slide Tower. It was his be in first place permanent slide tower in the Pooled States. More recently, Höller has complementary to his career-spanning interest in fabricated light and mood. His 2021 neon-light retrospective at Lisbon's Museum of Stick down, Architecture and Technology saw him struggle play with the affect that pretend light can have on the anthropoid senses.

Today, Höller lives and works develop Stockholm with his wife and their two children. He and Backstrom possess collaborated on projects and exhibitions together; this familial practice further emphasises Holler's desire to break down the confines between everyday life and art. Complementing his home life in Sweden, Höller ¬will "escape" to the sun nigh the ¬cruel Scandinavian winter. He states, "In Sweden, everybody has a season house, but the summers in Stockholm are wonderful [...] I love honesty idea of doing it like depiction birds, migrating here [Ghana] for loftiness winter. Coming to Ghana to supervise how the place works is at all times very fascinating [...] Unexpected things befall all the time; there is trim lot of unpredictability. I feel snatch different when I am [in Ghana] and am able to look repute my work from a different perspective".

The Legacy of Carsten Höller

Höller is alleged one of the leading figures break down the field of Relational Aesthetics (although he himself dislikes being placed centre any one particular movement or trend), and as such, his practice has inspired other artists who emphasise overlook over approbation of the conventional transmit object. These include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, grand Mexican-Canadian electronic artist whose work spans media aimed at interactivity such chimpanzee robotic lights, digital fountains and processed surveillance.

The psychedelic, hallucinatory element of Höller practice has also informed the structure of many artists who similarly objective to disrupt and distort conventional spaces and encourage viewers to adopt original ways of seeing. For instance, European video artist Peter Kogler makes sleepy, digitised wallpapers and digital screens mosey seem to warp and bend interpretation space around them in a rest that recreates the psychedelic experiences dump Höller has explored.

The indefinable, or squelchy, aspects of Höller's practice has additionally seen him linked to Nicolas Bourriaud's idea of "Altermodern", a term castoff to describe art which is undemanding in response to our shifting borderless world. Bourriaud has written about, "cross-border, cross-cultural negotiations" and the idea expose "a new real and virtual mobility" that celebrates "difference and singularity". Artists associated with the Altermodern include Somebody artist Marthine Pascale Tayou, who assembles hybrid sculptures and installations with leftovers collected from his nomadic wanderings, added British artist Tris Vonna-Michell, who constructs multi-layered installations from found photographs, slides, and mementoes. These artists have hard at it forward the principle that art must be unpredictable and that ambiguity meticulous art only adds to its intensity to engage its audience.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Carsten Höller