Why Is Everyone Crazy About Carsten Höller’s Pink Mirror Carousel?

By Janet Mercel on 01.22.26

Pink Mirror Carousel, the outdoor artwork by Carsten Höller, has drawn crowds all season because it offers something new in the glittering resort town: a slow, deliberate kind of spectacle. At Kulm Hotel St. Moritz, it transforms the rink into an outdoor drawing room, where you can live inside the artwork for a few quiet spins. It’s not about adrenaline, it is about the sensation of being gently carried, mirrored, and refracted in motion.

At first, it looks almost familiar, gently glowing in pale pink against snow and sky. The carousel is made up of twelve identical sections, forming a precise geometric ring—a dodecagon—that sits directly on the ice, open to views in every direction. Wrapped in mirrored panels, the structure catches everything around it, skaters gliding past, the surrounding Alps, the radical slowness playing with perception and time. A full rotation takes exactly two minutes.

The upper and middle sections rotate in opposite directions, a subtle detail that’s easy to miss at first, but once noticed, changes how you experience the passing of time. The counter-rotation creates a disorienting, poetic, and slightly surreal effect that challenges the sense of balance and direction. You don’t just look at it, you see yourself in it. Carousels have long fascinated Höller, who often describes them as “confusion machines.”

Check out our full review of the Kulm Hotel.

What makes the work feel so distinctly Höller is that he is essentially a scientist who never stopped playing. He began his career as a researcher, earning a doctorate studying how insects communicate by smell. His work has always been an ongoing experiment, turning science on its head. As an artist, he seems to delight in treating the world like a lab, making installations that feel like playgrounds for the mind.

As skaters circle the rink to a soundtrack curated by Arman Naféei, Kulm’s Directeur d’Ambiance (check out a playlist that he created for A Hotel Life), riders sit inside the carousel watching the world move by at an unhurried pace. From the outside, they are just as visible, gently elevated and reflected in pink mirrors, becoming part of the scene they came to observe.

The effect is unexpectedly calming. Like the his famous Unilever slides, the artist (who also goes by the pseudonym Baldo Hauser) says, “this is a sculpture with people inside, animating the inanimate, the mechanical, the lifeless rotation with the realness of human bodies being transported through their own biological time. A dream machine that may disappoint children expecting to be whirled around, while rewarding those reflecting on the essence of being.”

Kulm Hotel has been shaping winter culture since 1856, earning its reputation as the hotel that made winter. From early sporting innovations to contemporary art interventions, it has always treated the season as something to be imagined anew. Pink Mirror Carousel feels like a natural extension of a playful, thoughtful mindset.

Located on the Kulm Hotel ice rink opposite the Kulm Country Club, the carousel is open daily from 09:00 to 18:00, weather permitting, and is open to both hotel guests and the public.

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