ART CITIES:Geneva-Carsten Höller

 

 

In his work, Carsten Höller creates situations which question familiar forms of perception and allow exhibition visitors to experiment on themselves, often inviting the public’s active participation. Carsten Höller’s works are occasionally reminiscent of scientific laboratory arrangements, allowing the viewer to become the subject of an experiment.

By Dimitris Lempesis

Carsten Höller from his early work has used various ingenious methods to create a productive uncertainty in the relationship between the work and the viewer. This also applies to his participation at Documenta X in Kassel, in 1997, where his installation (a collaboration with German artist Rosemarie Trockel) showed pigs in a pigsty. His major installations include “Test Site”, “Amusement Park”, “The Double Club” and “Revolving Hotel Room”, a rotating installation which becomes a fully operational hotel room at night. “Zoology” at Gagosian Gallery in Geneva presents a selection of Höller’s recent sculptures, photographs, and prints, made the period 2008-16, which consider how different forms of animal life might relate to human embodied awareness. Through taxidermy, casting, molding, and collage, Höller presents beings that cannot be easily categorized: they are animals, but they do not occur in nature, they are the products of anthropocentric will-of mutation, breeding, and grafting. And just like the scientist turns captive birds into hybrids, Höller turns snakes into soft, squeezable curves of neon-pink artificiality. In their color and form, the animals become implacable rarities. Ιn “Divisions (Roach and Surface)” (2016), minimalist-industrial materials and a modulated orange grid form a suspension chamber for a small, shiny fish. In the series of photogravures “Canaries” (2009), birds perch with feathers growing at wild, intersecting angles. The exhibition adds another layer to Höller’s phenomenological queries.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 19 place de Longemalle, Geneva, Duration: 9/6-12/8/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com