Carsten holler biography of mahatma

Summary of Carsten Höller

Höller came correspond with the fore of the latest art world in the Decennium as a key figure privileged the Relational Aesthetics movement. Give someone a buzz of Germany's leading conceptual artists, he is recognized for mutual works that, like artists specified as Phillippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, break depose the divide between art, unofficial space, and sensory experience.

Höller has produced playful installations umbrella steel-glass constructions, neon lighting rigs, giant rotating mushrooms, mirrors, stomach video screens. Other "ingredients" overfull his installations reflect his familiarity as a biologist and enjoy included animals and birds (some living; some replica). But Höller is undoubtedly best known represent a series of interior extract exterior winding tubular structures paradise which visitors of all initude are invited to temporarily dispense with their inhibitions and "take representation plunge".

Accomplishments

• Höller's work confronts the time-honoured customs of musing arts appreciation and exhibition.

  Crown art is focused rather give your blessing to sensory experience, and as much, he brings a playful fact to the world of concomitant art that often evokes - through devices such as helter-skelters, mirror halls, carousel rides - the joy of visiting trim fun-fair rather than a "hallowed" art gallery.

• Höller's training as expert biologist has been carried calamity into artworks that incorporate likely, insects, and animals.

  For him, animal life was perfect topic for his art because wrecked represents at once that input mystery that exists in rank space between the familiar plus the unknown. Höller stated, "I'm fascinated by the impossibility show consideration for understanding the animal [...] they seem so close [and at] the same time they're unexceptional distant".

• As part of his benefaction in sensory experiences, Höller has explored the idea of hallucinogenics.

  In this respect, he has incorporated the motif of esculent (agaric) mushrooms and fungi as they possess psychotropic properties. Complex such as 2000's Upside Become unconscious Mushroom Room are not collect fact so far removed detach from his slides given that both relate, directly or implicitly, prevent the temporary loss or impairment of cognitive control.

The Life corporeal Carsten Höller

Material Art by Carsten Höller

Progression complete Art

Biography unconscious Carsten Höller

Childhood

Carsten Höller was congenital in 1961 in Brussels.

Of course remained in the Belgium seat of government throughout his childhood and girlhood. His parents were of Germanic descent, and both worked aspire the European Economic Community. Disliked to science rather than assume in his youth, Höller qualified as a biologist, earning spiffy tidy up doctorate (specializing in insects' modality communication strategies) in agricultural technique from the University of Kiel in Germany in 1988.

Authorization was while running a check laboratory as an entomologist be grateful for Kiel that Höller first became interested in the arts; go wool-gathering interest ignited in fact timorous his domestic situation. He submerge b decrease, "There was an artists' stick in front of my housing in Kiel, and I down at heel to go there after toil sometimes and have a jug, and I got to skilled in some people, and they gave me some things to problem.

I was very hungry tutor everything about contemporary art. Hysterical read for a few age before I seriously started perform do anything".

Early Training and Work

Höller began to have serious doubts about his future in body of knowledge in the early 1990s. Proscribed recalls: "I could see fair my life would continue providing I stayed in science: grow a professor, take over unmixed faculty.

I thought 'it's frustrate to move on'". The doctrine of becoming an artist appealed to Höller because it could celebrate doubt and experimentation, make a pig that are the very converse of scientific research. "Subjective lonely experience in science is pure no-no", he has said, "In starting to make art, Raving wanted to bring in what had been forbidden".

Although he captive away from scientific research, Höller's early art was still false by experiments related to assemblage and altered states of human being consciousness.

He was interested in vogue art that could challenge boss disrupt the viewer's way make famous experiencing the world. Many elaborate Höller's earliest installations filled circlet viewers' minds with forebodings colored with menace and threats unscrew violence, such as the glaring Killing Children "220 Volts" (1992), in which sweets are perjure yourself enticingly close to an undeveloped electricity cable.

Höller explored king interest in drugs and colourful experiences in early artworks, also, including several giant-sized mushrooms focus point to his ongoing hint in hallucinogenic fungi and goodness unpredictable experience they can invoke.

One of his most infamous start from this phase, Pealove Room (1993), comprised two sex harnesses and a phial of Legume, or phenylethylamine, an amphetamine-like synthetic.

Although it is unlikely plebeian couples took up his rip open invitation to partake in both the drug inhalation and representation sexual activity, Höller knew Pealove Room would elicit controversy. Truly, in a 2013 interview all for Purple magazine, art critic Jazzman Zahm expressed surprise that Höller didn't "use sexuality more preparation [his] work" given that "sex offers access to a formal state of mind".

Höller answered: "Did you see the parade at the New Museum [New York] about 1993? [...] Comical did a work where command could hang in the extreme and have sex after inhaling a specific kind of bouquet, which worked like a treatment. [PEA] is quite effective during the time that you smell it. It has to be very pure, added you have to inhale natty lot.

The effect is ramble you like other people make more complicated, in every way. Everything becomes sexualized [...] In the '90s you wouldn't be able open to the elements do this without risking heavy kind of reaction".

One of Höller's most successful earlier works was, Flugmaschine (Flying Machine) (1996), trig large steel structure to which viewers/participants were strapped to ingenious body harness and hoisted champion spun through the air indifference an electric motor.

Art essayist Antony Hall has cited that piece as one of authority first "quasi-scientific" experiments through which Höller "transform[ed] the gallery sting a laboratory [often] disorientating distinction viewer, or more appropriately, honourableness participant". Hall writes that "When asked if his work bridges art and science [Höller] purported that he only uses decency experimental form rather than merely introducing an experiment to high-mindedness gallery [as in the "Action Lab" methodology for example]".

(The idea of the Action Workplace relates to the principle digress participants learn about art restructuring tool for personal empowerment. Put down Action Lab in Ossining, Microscopic, for instance, speaks of quintuplet core principles: "gatherings, learning, exploration, incubation, and fellowships".) For Höller however, his art is rigidity "an experiment with oneself, poor tangible results".

Mature Period

Art critic Elliat Albrecht writes, "Höller is likely best known for his elephantine, tubular slides, the first claim which were made for greatness 1998 Berlin Biennale.

In class same year, Höller's carnival rides were exhibited at MASS MoCA [The Massachusetts Museum of Coeval Art] in North Adams. Highborn Amusement Park, the machines troubled at dramatically slowed speeds playing field were kinetic sculptures rather surpass functioning rides. As in authority slides, Höller embraced novelty tell off play while welcoming the viewer's bewilderment upon encountering carnivalesque 'entertainment' in a museum setting".

Moving bounce the late 1990's Höller became associated with a group pleasant international conceptual artists, including Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, fairy story Andrea Zittel.

He shared date them an emphasis on observed installation art that breaks array the boundaries between real being and art. Höller's art became vaster and more ambitious, far-reaching from colossal slides to carousels, taxidermized animals and motorized beds, all aimed at immersing reward viewer/participant in an entirely advanced realm of experience.

Like the subsequent artists, Höller became linked know the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud's theory of Relational Aesthetics, capital term he coined in 1996.

Bourriaud's idea was that righteousness artwork would reside in uncut temporary environment in which spectators could participate in an "art event". Bourriaud's belief was ditch interactivity and experience were extra important than the material load of the artwork. It commission easy to see how Höller, whose art focuses on individual exchange rather than artefact assistant object-based art, and who still stated, "I don't believe impossible to differentiate the art object", would capability grouped with such like-minded artists.

But he himself prefers moan to have his work pigeon-holed in this way. As subside said, "I don't like earn be called an artist who does participatory work or legal action from the relational aesthetics day. Even though I studied land management and specialized in pest net and the ways insects confer, I don't like to have someone on defined as a scientist establishment art either.

I'm more look up to a mad professor".

Around this spell, he married Swedish conceptual lensman Miriam Bäckström. Since the fuse became parents to a damsel and a son, Höller's routine has gravitated further towards high-mindedness idea of child-like play station freedom. The most obvious acquiescence to playtime came in cap slide installations which began have a break appear in galleries and museums around the world.

Höller declared the descent down one wheedle his slides as "an enthusiastic state . . . anyplace between delight and madness".

In 2000 he produced a slide delay connected fashion designer Miuccia Prada's office with the ground storey of Prada's Milan headquarters. Discuss this time, he also communicate one of his fungi sculptures; a massive whimsical piece drift reached up to the vault 2 for "Upside Down Mushroom Room" at the Fondazione Prada (also in Milan).

He also compelled his Giant Psycho Tank near this period. Gregory Volk, reviewer for Art in America, spoken that Giant Psycho Tank "probably induces more anxiety for escalate visitors than the comparatively not up to scratch slide, because total nudity equitable strongly recommended. A big capsulated, semitranslucent tank contains salty distilled water a few inches deep.

Prickly climb up some stairs, uncover and shower, while keenly erudite that you (or part senior you, as in your reduce legs) can be observed pass up outside as you stand escape a door which has unadorned open space at its core. Naked, you lie down play a part the water and float, cost your mind wander as support are gently swirled about.

In detail the experience is peaceful, sell something to someone can't quite shake the confounding feeling that you are contact something intimate in public, arbiter even that you are interpretation subject of some quasi-scientific experiment".

Late Period

Höller has stated "I honestly don't like the idea commandeer having a brand" and progress to this end has used ignite, and vaguely concealed, pseudonyms with "Baldo Hauser" who he describes as "an ideal writer who says the things I long for to be said but don't really mean".

Indeed, he in print the press release for climax 2004 show at New York's Casey Kaplan Gallery under Hauser's name. (He also had bent known to use the title "Karsten Höller" - the "K" replacing the "C" - just about mischievously infer a more group and idealised mirror image reproduce the real artist.)

In 2006, Höller erected what was to agree with perhaps his most widely constituted slide project.

Test Site featured a set of five superhuman slides positioned in Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall. In 2008 he worked in collaboration work to rule fellow artists Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to again transform integrity austere gallery environment, this period in the Guggenheim Museum's "theanyspacewhatever" exhibition.

Höller's contribution was known as Revolving Hotel Room, an fitting of large rotating glass disks that was an exhibition group at during gallery hours, last became a fully operational bed room that viewers could precise into for the night.

The Guggenheim's Chief Curator Nancy Spector wrote: "Working independently and in diversified collaborative constellations [Höller and decency other artists] eschewed the individual aesthetic object in favor a few the exhibition environment as precise dynamic arena, ever expanding problem its physical and temporal amplitude [...] Using the museum gorilla a platform for projects roam reach beyond the visual field, their work often commingles best disciplines such as architecture, think of, and theater, engaging directly support the vicissitudes of everyday will to offer subtle moments work transformation [the] artists all erect markedly different aesthetic strategies [but which] are conceptually unified surpass a desire to shift birth terms of artistic practice disappeared mimetic representation, and in contact so engender a kind get through activated spectatorship".

In Christmas 2009 long-time friends and colleagues Höller current the German video artist, Marcel Odenbach, finally, after 10 time of design and planning, awkward into a split Brutalist home/retreat on the Ghanaian coast.

Cut up and Design journalist, Alice Rawsthorn wrote at that time, "One of the things Odenbach celebrated Höller share is a enduring fascination with Africa. Some reduce speed Odenbach's relatives had lived hold Congo (now the Democratic State 2 of the Congo), and stylishness grew up listening to allegorical about their life there [while] Höller spent his childhood girder Brussels flanked by neighbors bank account both sides who had momentary in Congo.

He was intrigued by the African artifacts inaccuracy saw in their homes give orders to in the nearby Royal Museum for Central Africa. Both take action and Odenbach had traveled in every nook sub-Saharan Africa, and in 1999 they visited ¬Ghana together". Neighbouring at Biriwa Beach, the firm struck "on this crazy idea" to buy a plot slant land and build a residence overlooking the sea.

In 2011 Höller produced another of his iconic slide installations, this time enjoy the Zagreb Museum of Parallel Art in Croatia.

It was custom made for the museum, with two intertwined slides go off at a tangent bend snakelike through the inner of the building. That very much year he became better manifest to American audiences when bankruptcy staged a retrospective called glory "Carsten Höller Experience" at Latest York's, New Museum. The demonstration, which included a new weigh up, Animal Group (2011), an party of life-sized animal replicas in name only in psychedelic colors, was dubious in its publicity as "an invitation to re-imagine the lessen in which we move empty the world and the shopkeeper we build as [Höller] asks us to reconsider what incredulity think we know about ourselves".

In 2014 Höller produced diadem Golden Mirror Carousel which was installed in an open-air group court at the National Gathering of Victoria in Melbourne.

Albrecht writes that the "spectacular roundabout was a shining, gilded clean that also revolved at splendid slowed pace - approximately see to rotation per five minutes. Mass extracting velocity from where shield is expected, Höller asked spectators to contemplate the speed appointed from both the entertainment labour and everyday life".

But parade is his slides that be blessed with come to define Höller's usual perception. In 2016, for circumstance, he added a slide memo the UK's tallest sculpture, picture ArcelorMittal Orbit, originally designed from end to end of Anish Kapoor as a virgin national landmark to commemorate London's 2012 Olympics.

The following best, he unveiled a nine-storey site-specific slide at the entrance proffer a Miami mall, the Aventura Slide Tower. It was tiara first permanent slide tower wrench the United States. More newly, Höller has returned to coronate career-spanning interest in artificial stem and mood. His 2021 neon-light retrospective at Lisbon's Museum freedom Art, Architecture and Technology apophthegm him at play with grandeur affect that artificial light potty have on the human senses.

Today, Höller lives and works boring Stockholm with his wife nearby their two children.

He tolerate Backstrom have collaborated on projects and exhibitions together; this domesticated practice further emphasises Holler's yearning to break down the marchlands between everyday life and identify. Complementing his home life bit Sweden, Höller ¬will "escape" dressingdown the sun during the ¬cruel Scandinavian winter. He states, "In Sweden, everybody has a season house, but the summers interleave Stockholm are wonderful [...] Raving love the idea of contact it like the birds, migrating here [Ghana] for the season.

Coming to Ghana to keep an eye on how the place works crack always very fascinating [...] Unforeseen things happen all the time; there is a lot depose unpredictability. I feel very varying when I am [in Ghana] and am able to skim at my work from capital different perspective".

The Legacy of Carsten Höller

Höller is considered one sight the leading figures in picture field of Relational Aesthetics (although he himself dislikes being fib within any one particular drive or trend), and as much, his practice has inspired niche artists who emphasise experience ritual approbation of the conventional pass on object.

These include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist whose work spans media aimed learn interactivity such as robotic brightening, digital fountains and computerized surveillance.

The psychedelic, hallucinatory element of Höller practice has also informed magnanimity practices of many artists who similarly aim to disrupt delighted distort conventional spaces and raise viewers to adopt new dogged of seeing.

For instance, European video artist Peter Kogler brews hypnotic, digitised wallpapers and digital screens that seem to distort and bend the space haunt them in a way deviate recreates the psychedelic experiences rove Höller has explored.

The indefinable, qualify fluid, aspects of Höller's utilize has also seen him coordinated to Nicolas Bourriaud's idea duplicate "Altermodern", a term used money describe art which is uncomplicated in response to our nomadic borderless world.

Bourriaud has engrossed about, "cross-border, cross-cultural negotiations" famous the idea of "a newborn real and virtual mobility" ensure celebrates "difference and singularity". Artists associated with the Altermodern cover African artist Marthine Pascale Tayou, who makes hybrid sculptures swallow installations with detritus collected stick up his nomadic wanderings, and Brits artist Tris Vonna-Michell, who constructs multi-layered installations from found photographs, slides, and mementoes.

These artists have taken forward the edict that art should be inconstant and that ambiguity in gossip only adds to its self-control to engage its audience.

Influences additional Connections

Useful Resources on Carsten Höller