Höller: It’s Playtime
Carsten Höller
A carousel in Berlin, a nightclub in London, slides at the Tate and a rentable hotel roomat the Gagosian: Carsten Höller is an artist who likes to havefun. Participation and pleasure are key to his lively creations, which confrontmetaphysical concerns—happiness, fear, love and mortality—with anidiosyncratic sense of humor typified by works such as Hippopotamus, 2007 (a lifelike sculpture of a pink hippo) and1997’s Myself-Onself (an exhibitionwhich featured, among other things, a human-sized hamster wheel). Höller’slatest retrospective, Divided Divided, isriddled with quirks, including a room with swinging walls and a mobile constructedfrom caged, singing canaries. DividedDivided opens at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen on February 6.