ROME.- Enel Contemporanea is in favour of the MACRO’s exhibition schedule in the autumn with one of the most important artists today: Carsten Höler, the winner of the 2011 edition.

Enel Contemporanea Award 2011 is the prize promoted by Enel within its programme entitled Enel Contemporanea, which calls for the annual production of an original artwork on the theme of energy.

The winning piece Double Carousel with Zöllner Stripes will be on display from the 1st December to 26th March 2012 in free access at the MACRO, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome in the space of the Enel Room on the ground floor, which is one of the biggest exhibition halls in Europe.

The public will be able to interact with the two moving merry-go-rounds created by the artist. Turning slowly and in opposite directions, the merry-go-rounds allow the public to get on and off easily, as if they were enormous mills or grindstones, where the people, sitting on top, come closer together and move further apart in constant rotation. Around the merry-go-rounds, criss-crossing lines create a destabilizing effect, wherein spatial perception is deformed, creating a slowed-down vision of reality.

The artwork was selected by the international jury, which met on the 2nd of June in Venice at the 54th International Art Exhibition, of which Enel is the main sponsor. The jury chose the laureate among 3 internationally recognised artists - Carsten Höller (Belgium), Bruce Mau (Canada) and Paola Pivi (Italy) - invited to participate in the competition by the Artistic Director of the Award, Francesco Bonami.

The jury, presided by Gianluca Comin, Enel’s Group Director of External Relations, was made up of representatives of some of the most prestigious international arts institutions: Joseph Backstein (Curator of the Moscow Art Biennial), Luca Massimo Barbero (MACRO former Director, Rome), Iwona Blazwick (Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London), Massimiliano Gioni (Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan), Ivo Mesquita (Chief Curator of the Sao Paolo National Gallery), Jack Persekian (Director of the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem).

Born in Brussels in 1961, Carsten Höller a graduate in Agronomy, with a specialization in plant pathology and a Masters’ thesis on olfactory communication between insects, uses art as a cognitive tool in probing objective reality and perception. Disorientation is a key feature in all of his work from the rotating mushrooms suspended from the ceiling of the Prada Foundation in 2000 to the steel slides Test Site in Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern in 2006, as part of the Unilever Series, to his most recent exhibition, Soma, at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. Carsten Höller has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in such prestigious international institutions as the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art and the Bregenz Kunsthaus. He represented Sweden at the Venice Biennial 51st International Art Exhibition and has participated in numerous editions of Documenta and the Sao Paolo Biennial. The New Museum of New York will soon feature an exhibition of his works. He lives and works in Stockholm.