Carsten Höller

(German, born 1961)

Carsten Höller is contemporary German conceptual artist. Through a wide variety of large-scale, interactive works, he has established himself as one of the most inventive and influential artists at work today. One his most iconic works, The Slide at the Arcelor Mittal Orbit (2016), consists of the world’s largest and tallest tunnel slide, which he created with the help of Anish Kapoor. “A slide is a sculpture that you can travel inside,” Höller remarked. “People coming down the slides have a particular expression on their faces, they’re affected and to some degree ‘changed.’” He emerged as a major figure of the Relational Aesthetics movement of the 1990s alongside artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Andrea Zittel by creating artworks that foster shared group experiences and connections between its audience members. What sets Höller apart is his background as a trained scientist, which has featured into his technologically complex installations that regularly incorporate buildings, lighting, and computer games. Born in December 1961 in Brussels, Belgium, he went on to study insects and their olfactory communications, eventually earning a doctorate in agricultural science and working as a research entomologist before committing himself to artmaking full-time in 1993. Höller has been the subject of major museum exhibitions worldwide, including at MASS MoCA, the Tate Modern, and the Guggenheim in New York for their survey theanyspacewhatever in 2008–2009. The artist lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, and Biriwa, Ghana.