How a small gallery director became art world’s most powerful figure

The fast-talking Hans Ulrich Obrist, recently in Hong Kong for the opening of a Zaha Hadid exhibition, recalls how he got into art and the impact of the architect’s death last year

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Published: 1:18pm, 30 Mar 2017Updated: 10:28am, 31 Mar 2017

According to ArtReview, Hans Ulrich Obrist is currently the most powerful man in the art world. He’s not an artist, he’s not a collector and he’s not a dealer. Although the British contemporary-art magazine bestowed its honour for “his energy and the fact that he connects so many people”, Obrist’s official job title is artistic director of the – relatively small – Serpentine Galleries, in London’s Kensington Gardens. And his actual profession is curator.

When he told his Swiss parents that was what he planned to be, they thought he was going into the medical field: in German, as in English, the word goes back to the Latin root “to take care of”. The people Obrist takes care of, however, are not (although this, of course, depends on your attitude towards contemporary art) usually unwell.

HUO, as he’s widely designated – even the three letters somehow convey an unidentifiable organisation of global heft – was in Hong Kong recently for the opening of an exhibition of the work of the late architect Zaha Hadid at ArtisTree, in Quarry Bay. The show began its life at the Serpentine in December, nine months after Hadid’s sudden death. She had been one of its trustees for more than 20 years.

Hadid was not only an architect, he says, but “a great artist”, and this intersection is the point of the exhibition. It’s the sort of overlap that fuels HUO’s interest; his book Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects was published in 2015.

Obrist has written many other art-related books, of course, and they follow the conventional rules of grammar; this is only worth mentioning because, in conversation, he doesn’t believe in using full stops but talks in one long, fluid, Swiss-accented torrent of names and quotes and intellectual leaps. Occasionally there is a tiny breath of a comma, and sometimes even a semicolon; but while he pauses to consult his phone and pull up something relevant (and your own mind is in boggle overdrive) the air overhead still pulses with residual vigour.