INS 005         Double Mushroom Vitrine         Carsten Höller         2000–2020

Header image: Double Mushroom Vitrine (Tenfold), 2020 
© Carsten Höller, Massimo de Carlo
Text: artnet

The work is part of a series of mushroom sculptures that the artist started making in the early 2000s. Questioned about his interests in mushrooms, Höller has said: "the fruiting bodies of fungi, which we call mushrooms, come in a large variety of shapes, colours, and ingredients ­— but this variety doesn't make sense as they don't communicate and don't want to attract animals in order to spread their spores, as far as we know. There is something going on there that we don't understand. The fly agaric, in it's splendid colourful display and it's toxicity, is an especially striking example of this enigmatic uselessness." 

The artist continues to apply the doubling method in Double Mushroom Vitrine (Twice) a glass vitrine that contains life-sized casts of wild mushrooms: half a fly agaric is mounted to half a fruiting body of another mushroom of similar height. The vitrine contains two of these half/half mushroom replicas.

Double Mushroom Vitrine (Twice), 2016
All following images © Carsten Höller, Massimo de Carlo

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