Carsten Höller

For a long time, I’ve been curious about applying the methodology of art as one way—which I think is equal to science and other powerful explanatory concepts—for us to understand what is surrounding us and what we are.
—Carsten Höller

Gagosian is pleased to announce Clocks, an exhibition of new and rarely seen earlier works by Carsten Höller. Occupying the gallery at rue de Castiglione and the exterior-facing vitrine at rue de Ponthieu, the exhibition focuses on how the measurement of time impacts human ways of being.

Höller applies scientific procedures to his work as an artist with playful and sometimes dark humor. Many of the projects that comprise his “Laboratory of Doubt”—from twisting slides to vision-flipping goggles—incorporate disorienting experiences to be conducted on oneself.

“I wanted to make the most complicated clock on earth,” says Höller of Half Clock (2021). In this neon sculpture, three encapsulated spheres of curved lighting tubes represent seconds, minutes, and hours. Time is indicated by the division of the surface of each sphere into spatial units, which are themselves divided into consecutively smaller parts. While half of the time is not represented at all—hence the work’s title—the clock’s accuracy increases with each subsequent division of space.