NYAB Event - Carsten Höller "Birds and Mushroom"

Carsten Höller "Birds and Mushroom"

Carolina Nitsch Project Room

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Carolina Nitsch presents an exhibition of three suites of photogravure etchings by Carsten Höller, at Carolina Nitsch Project Room.

Carsten Höller is known for large scale conceptual installations which serve as experiments and frequently require participation from the viewer to take their final form. His central concerns relate to human behavior, the questioning of logic, altered states of mind and perception. His works often create a sense of uncertainty were multiple interpretations swirl without becoming static and comprehensible.

Mushrooms have been a common theme in Höller’s work, most notably in his Upside Down Mushroom Room (2000), which consists of a room with several large scale replicas of Amanita slowly rotating while suspended from the ceiling. This same genus of fungi is presented here in a suite of twelve, four color photogravures. However these prints are intentionally printed out of register creating a sense of movement and disorientation in the viewer. Höller has created other installations that play with the perceptions of the human eye such as his Upside-Down Goggles (1994-2001) and the flashing colored spheres of Phi Wall (2002).

The suite titled Birds are photogravures of various crossbred song birds and, similarly, Canaries is a suite of crossbred canaries. Höller is known as a keen ornithologist and has included live birds in some of his installations. His experiment in cross breeding resulted in unique hybrid birds, which are the first and last of its kind. Here they are documented in an attempt to preserve their “lastness”.This project relates to another project, The Last Image (2004), where he asked the public to provide a photograph that captured the last of something or someone.

Carsten Höller was born in 1961 in Brussels, Belgium. He studied agricultural entomology at the University of Kiel where he received his doctorate in 1988. By the 1990s, he began to make artworks and eventually abandoned science as profession to pursue a career as an artist. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of international institutions including the Moderna Museet in Sweden (1999); Fondazione Prada in Milan (2000); MASS MoCA (2006); Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria (2008), and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2010). This autumn, the New Museum will present the first New York survey exhibition of his projects. Höller lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

[Image: Carsten Höller "BIRDS" (2006) Suite of 10 color photogravure prints on 300 gr. Somerset paper, Each 29 ½ x 22 7/8 in. Edition of 24, each signed and numbered]