26 October 2011 - 15 January 2012
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| © Carsten Höller
Mirror Carousel, 2005
Mirrors mounted on MDF panels, lightbulbs, stainless steels seats,
stainless steel chains, steel construction, electric motor, cables
Height: 470 cm, Footprint: 750 x 750 cm |
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CARSTEN HÖLLER
Experience
26 October, 2011 - 15 January, 2012
This autumn, the New Museum will present the first New York survey
exhibition of the work of the German artist Carsten Höller (b. 1961,
Brussels, lives and works in Stockholm). Over the past twenty years,
Höller has created a world that is equal parts laboratory and test site,
exploring such themes as childhood, safety, love, the future, and
doubt. Höller left his early career as a scientist in 1993 to devote
himself exclusively to art making, and his work is often reminiscent of
research experiments. His pieces are designed to explore the limits of
human sensorial perception and logic through carefully controlled
participatory experiences.
The New Museum’s exhibition will include work produced over the past
eighteen years in an immersive, interactive installation choreographed
in collaboration with the artist. Höller will actively engage the
Museum’s architecture, with each of the three main gallery floors and
lobby of the building presenting a focused selection of pieces that
demonstrate different experiential dimensions of his work. Functioning
as an alternative transportation system within the Museum, one of
Höller’s signature slide installations will run from the fourth floor to
the second, perforating ceilings and floors, to shuttle viewers through
the exhibition as a giant 102-foot-long pneumatic mailing system. The
exhibition features a new light installation; disorienting architectural
environments; a spectacular mirrored carousel; and a sensory
deprivation pool, among others. Also included will be a recreation of
Höller’s Experience Corridor, where viewers are invited to undertake
simple but affecting tests on themselves.
The selected works emphasize the experimental quality of Höller’s work
and reveal the complex universe of one of the most significant European
artists to emerge in the past twenty years. Höller came to prominence
alongside a group of artists in the 1990s including Maurizio Cattelan,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and
Rirkrit Tiravanija who worked across disciplines to re-imagine the
experience and the space of art. Höller stands out among this group for
the manner in which his installations drew on the history and method of
scientific experimentation to destabilize the viewer’s perception of
space, time, and the concept of self. In providing this first
opportunity for the public here to examine the full scope of Höller’s
artistic experiments, the exhibition follows in the New Museum’s long
tradition of introducing the most adventurous international artists to
an American audience.
Carsten Höller’s work is first and foremost concerned with altering our
basic assumptions about what we see, feel, and understand about
ourselves. Over the years, the artist has employed psychotropic drugs,
flashing lights, and architectural alterations to overwhelm viewers with
visual stimuli and challenge accepted self-perceptions. For example,
the new installation Double Light Corner (2011) uses a sequence of
flashing lights to give the viewer the sensation that the space around
them is flipping back and forth. Höller also has exhibited a variety of
adapted amusement park rides, their speeds slowed until they move almost
imperceptibly. His Mirror Carousel (2005) provides riders with a
radically different physical experience than the traditional fairground
merry-go-round, while at the same time reflecting and illuminating the
space surrounding it. In such works, Höller invites us to reconsider the
meanings of play and participation. In concert with his giant mushroom
sculptures and hyperrealistic sculptures of animals, the artist creates a
visionary world that hovers below the surface of what we experience
every day.
Höller’s art has often taken the form of proposals for radical new ways
of living. He has created sculptures and diagrams for visionary
architecture and transportation alternatives, like his renowned slide
installations and flying cities. These concepts may seem impossible in
the present day, but suggest new models for the future. The artist’s
proposals and structures invite the viewer to re-imagine the social and
sensorial possibilities of domestic space. During the 1990s, Höller
collaborated with artist Rosemarie Trockel to create structures shared
between humans and animals such as pigs, birds, and mosquitoes, calling
into question hierarchies of species and the roles of the observer and
the observed. Recently, Höller has invited viewers to share the
exhibition space with a variety of creatures from reindeer to canaries
to mice.
At the New Museum, viewers will be encouraged to test a variety of
sculptural experiences. In Höller’s Psycho Tank (1999), visitors will
float weightlessly in a sensory deprivation pool, providing a strange
out-of-body experience. In these scenarios, as in his other work, Höller
treats the viewer as the subject and audience for his radical and
disorienting experiments.
"Carsten Höller: Experience” is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Associate
Director and Director of Exhibitions, with Gary Carrion-Murayari,
Associate Curator, and Jenny Moore, Assistant Curator.
www.newmuseum.org
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