Höller: It’s Playtime

A carousel in Berlin, a nightclub in London, slides at the Tate and a rentable hotel room at the Gagosian: Carsten Höller is an artist who likes to have fun. Participation and pleasure are key to his lively creations, which confront metaphysical concerns—happiness, fear, love and mortality—with an idiosyncratic sense of humor typified by works such as Hippopotamus, 2007 (a lifelike sculpture of a pink hippo) and 1997’s Myself-Onself (an exhibition which featured, among other things, a human-sized hamster wheel). Höller’s latest retrospective, Divided Divided, is riddled with quirks, including a room with swinging walls and a mobile constructed from caged, singing canaries. Divided Divided opens at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen on February 6.