Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is a Swiss art curator, critic, and art historian. 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.

Obrist was born in Weinfelden, Switzerland on May 24, 1968. His father worked in the construction industry finance areas and his mother was a teacher. Obrist grew up in the Alps near Lake Constance and says his interest in museums began when his parents took him to the library of a monastery at the age of 6. In his childhood Obrist was "building museums curated in my bedroom" by decorating his room with postcards. From 1985 to 1991 Obrist was travelling and visiting various European-based artists and their studios, often sleeping on the train to his next destination to save money. The first artist he first visited were Peter Fischli & David Weiss.

Obrist first gained art world attention at the age of 23, when as a student in Politics and Economics in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1991, he mounted an exhibition in the kitchen of his apartment entitled "The Kitchen Show/"World Soup" It featured work by Christian Boltanski and Peter Fischli & David Weiss.

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, 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.

In 2003, Obrist curated, as part of the Venice Biennale, "Utopia Station"; an interview with Obrist about the project appears in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World.

By 2005, The Guardian reported that Obrist had interviewed to succeed Philip Dodd as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.