Ballard’s claim that the most beautiful building in London is the Hilton Hotel at Heathrow Airport, and the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha’s observation that “in-betweenness is a fundamental condition of our times.” Obrist is enormously fond of quoting. The kind of culture he cares about is mobile and far-flung and can be grasped better on the move. He goes to meet emerging artists and check in with old ones, to see shows small and large. By his count, he has made roughly two thousand trips in the past twenty years, and while in London I discovered that he had been away fifty of the previous fifty-two weekends. But on weekends Obrist becomes who he truly is: a traveller. When I visited him in London in late August, two exhibitions that he had organized were up: “512 hours,” a “durational performance” piece by Marina Abramović, and a show of computer-generated video art by Ed Atkins. On weekdays, he works at the Serpentine offices there are meetings over budgets and fund-raising, and Obrist, with his fellow-director, Julia Peyton-Jones, selects artists to exhibit and helps them shape their shows.

A few years ago, ArtReview named him the most powerful figure in the field, but Obrist, a forty-six-year-old Swiss, seems less to stand atop the art world than to race around, up, over, and through it. Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator at the Serpentine, a gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens that was once a teahouse and is now firmly established as a center for contemporary art.

Want it? Click the button to explore your size and framing options.Hans Ulrich Obrist has conducted twenty-four hundred hours of interviews with creative people: “salons of the twenty-first century.” Photograph by Roe Ethridge Trimmed with a 2cm / 1' border means prints are ready-to-frame.Available framed & ready-to-hang White, black & oak wooden frames.

Sustainable cotton mix, archival paper so it will last for years.

Sunlight-resistant, water-based inks so your piece stays vivid & bright.

State-of-the-art giclée printers give brilliant, rich colour & crisp detail.

Read on to find out why our exceptional prints are a cut above the rest. Walls looking a little bare? Looking to liven ‘em up with some inspiring wall art? Transform your boring, blank walls into a space that screams ‘OMG, this is sooo me!’.

The Black Lips Modern Art Torrent