Giant Multiple Mushrooms (Large and Small)

Carsten Höller’s Giant Multiple Mushrooms sculptures not only stand out by sheer scale—the large one is bigger than a human—they also entice with their surreal, hybrid design: a striking red-and-white spotted, half umbrella-shaped cap, and three smaller segments in the shape of a distorted pie chart, are collaged onto the massive white stem. A black droplet is dripping from the stem of the inkcap, right next to the incision where the mushrooms must have been cut up. In correspondence with Höller’s ongoing investigation of “doubles” and “divisions,” where he applies simple formulas and complex mathematical concepts to re-devise objects and spaces, the artist associates each cross-section to a different local, fungal species, the fly agaric (180°), the magpie (90°), the honey fungus (45°), and the sulphur polypore (22.5°). 

Höller has been researching the phenomenological and psychoactive properties of mushrooms, in particular of the Amanita muscaria (fly agaric), a highly poisonous type of fungus with psychoactive qualities, for over twenty years: “I find mushrooms appealing in many ways, because they’re so powerful in terms of form, color, taste, and toxicity, and are so unnecessary. They’re really a conundrum—we don’t know why they are like they are. Usually evolution is adaptive, but I don’t see any adaption there.”

Indeed, the recurrent use of fungi has been part of a profound but gentle, assertive but disarmingly humorous exploration of transformative powers accredited to work of art. Höller unlocks ideals and fantasies inherent to the practice of art and its reception. “For him, this commonplace organism holds the potential to extend one‘s imaginative faculties, to enhance one‘s vision, to intoxicate and transform.”