Carsten Höller, 2025 Photo: My Matson/Moderna Museet
About Carsten Höller
Biography
Carsten Höller was born in Belgium in 1961 to German parents. He lives and works in Stockholm; in Biriwa, Ghana, and in Tuscany, Italy. He has a background as a researcher in natural sciences and received his doctorate in 1988 at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU), Germany, with a thesis on insect scent communication. In the early 1990s, he completely devoted himself to his artistic work.
Carsten Höller’s works have been shown internationally over the past three decades, with major installations and solo exhibitions including Synchro System (2000), Fondazione Prada, Milan; One Day, One Day, Färgfabriken, Stockholm (2003); The Double Club (2008–09), a work that created a dialogue between Congolese and Western culture in the form of a bar, restaurant and nightclub in London; Soma, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2010); Experience, New Museum, New York (2011); Decision, Hayward Gallery, London (2015); Doubt, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2016); Y, Centro Botín, Santander (2017); SUNDAY, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2019); DAY, MAAT, Lisbon (2021); a third version of The Double Club (2024), which was installed for four days in Los Angeles in conjunction with the exhibition Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.
Carsten Höller’s “Slides” have been shown around the world, both as permanent and temporary installations. Among them are Test Site (2006), Tate Modern, London; Victoria Slide (2011), New Museum, New York; Vitra Slide Tower (2014), Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein; Isomeric Slides (2015), Hayward Gallery, London; Florence Experiment Slides (2018), Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; DAC Slide (2020), Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen; and Isometric Slides (2021), Luma Foundation, Arles.
In 2022, Carsten Höller opened Brutalisten in Stockholm – a restaurant with brutalist cuisine where each dish consists of only one ingredient. In 2024, Giant Triple Mushroom (2024) was temporarily installed at Place Vendôme in Paris as part of the Art Basel public program. The same year, the second edition of Höller’s “Book of Games/Spielebuch” was published by Taschen.
