Carsten Höller

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Carsten Höller

the last avant-garde

interview by OLIVIER ZAHM
portrait by GIASCO BERTOLI

 

Belgian artist Carsten Höller is part of a generation of artists, born in the 1960s, including Douglas Gordon, Maurizio Cattelan, Pierre Huyghe, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, to name a few, who, in the mid-1990s, made art from a different and much broader perspective, being influenced by the cinema, utopian architecture, and literature, and moving out of the typical artist’s studio.

Höller trained and practiced as a biologist, specializing in the olfactory communication of insects, before abandoning science in the late 1980s to take up art, producing works imbued with laboratory-like curiosity, but applied to something like curiosity itself. His engagement, as such, tends to be emotional, physical, aesthetic, and experiential. He’s made works with live reindeers and candy-looking, life-size dolphins, boa constrictors, and a baby elephant with artificial human eyes.

More recently he…