Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is a Swiss art curator, critic, and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art review. He lives and works in London.
Life and work
Obrist was born in Weinfelden, Switzerland on May 24, 1968. Obrist first gained art world attention at the age 23 in 1991, when as a student in Politics and Economics in St. Gallen, Switzerland, he mounted an exhibition in the kitchen of his apartment entitled The Kitchen Show It featured work by Christian Boltanski and Peter Fischli & David Weiss.
museum in progress, 1993–2000
Some of his early projects Obrist curated for the art initiative museum in progress in Vienna, for example the legendary exhibition museum in progress with Alighiero Boetti on board of Austrian Airlines in 1993 (using images from Boetti's “Airplanes” series, both in every in-flight magazine and as a free jigsaw puzzle, given to passengers), Interventions in the daily newspaper Der Standard 1995 with artists like Christian Marclay, Matt Mullican and Lawrence Weiner, and Travelling Eye in the magazine Profil 1995/1996 with John Baldessari, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Gerhard Richter amongst others.
Obrist has also been a jury member of the art project Safety Curtain, which museum in progress has been realizing at the Vienna State Opera with famous artists like Tauba Auerbach, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Jeff Koons, Maria Lassnig, Rosemarie Trockel, Cy Twombly and Carrie Mae Weems since 1998.
In 1993, Obrist founded the Museum Robert Walser and began to run the Migrateurs program at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris where he served as a curator for contemporary art. In 1996, he co-curated Manifesta 1, the first edition of the roving European biennial of contemporary art.
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2000–2006
In 2003, Obrist curated "Utopia Station" (a section of the Venice Biennale) and was briefly interviewed about the project in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World.
By 2005, The Guardian reported that Obrist had interviewed to succeeed Philip Dodd as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
Serpentine Galleries, 2006–present
In 2006, Serpentine Galleries director Julia Peyton-Jones appointed Obrist as her co-director of exhibitions and programs. Since Peyton-Jones left the organization in 2016, Obrist has worked alongside successive co-directors Yana Peel (2016–2019) and Bettina Korek (since 2019).
In addition to his role as the Serpentine Galleries, Obrist has been the international programs advisor to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (since 2018) and the artistic adviser to The Shed in New York (since 2018).
While maintaining official curatorial positions, Obrist is also the co-founder of the Brutally Early Club, a discussion group open to all that meets at Starbucks in London, Berlin, New York and Paris at 6:30 a.m. In 2007, Obrist co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philippe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival, also presented at Art Basel, 2009, organised by Fondation Beyeler and Theater Basel. In 2008 he curated Everstill at the Lorca House in Granada.
In 2013, Obrist co-founded with Simon Castets the 89plus, a long-term, international, multi-platform research project with support from Google, conceived as a mapping of the digitally native generation born in or after 1989.
In 2014, Obrist curated the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where he presented Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price; the building was designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, and the program was developed with artists Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
In 2022, Obrist organized a Jota Mombaça performance staged on San Giacomo in Paludo to kick off the construction of an arts space operated by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.