Carsten Höller to Take Over the Hayward Gallery

The Hayward Gallery might close for two years from fall 2015, but it’s set to end with a bang. London’s Southbank gallery has just announced that, next June, it will host the first UK retrospective of German oddball Carsten Höller, best-known in the country for putting a giant slide at Tate Modern (Test Slide, 2006).

“Visitors will have a choice of how they enter the show and exit it,” the gallery director Ralph Rugoff told The Guardian, “with those choices leading to quite dramatically different results experiences.”

As if anticipating criticisms, he added: “I hope this will introduce people to the nuances of Carsten’s work because sometimes his work is quite subtle and I think he is one of those artists who because of this huge turbine hall sensation he created, has almost been indelibly associated in the minds of Londoners with this type of spectacular work and yet he’s done many different types of things.

“A lot of his work is really about the psychology of making decision- what happens when you don’t know something, how do you move forward, how do you make connections in the dark.”