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GOD OF PLANET ART; Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist is now the most powerful figure in international art. Fortunately, as he tells Alison Roberts, he considers the artists to be more important.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Alison Roberts

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the "super-curator" at the serpentine Gallery named last week as the most powerful figure in the international art world, put on his very first exhibition at the age of 23 -- in his kitchen. It was 1991 and Obrist was a student (of politics and economics, not art) living in st Gallen in his native switzerland. The show, called World soup, featured seven internationally acclaimed artists whom Obrist had sought out in their studios on long inter-railing trips across Europe, including Christian Boltanski in Rome and Richard Wentworth in London. Yes, Wentworth "came all the way to switzerland to make an installation in my kitchen", confirms Obrist matter-of-factly.

"That was the start of it all, the very first exhibition, though I had known since I was 17 that I would be a curator." He pauses mid-flow to consider this startling fact. "It's quite an obscure notion for a kid, no? To want to be a curator. But even then I knew that I would do this." Later he adds, entirely sincerely: "I really do think artists are the most important people on the planet, and if what I do is a utility and helps them, then that makes me happy.

I want to be helpful."

That the then-utterly-unknown Obrist could conceive and pull off an exhibition of famous artists in his student kitchen is partly a measure of his amazing ability to befriend and charm people -- and to network. nowadays he has surely the biggest and most diverse set of...

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