Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects

From world-renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects offers a unique opportunity to learn about the lives and creativity of the world's leading artists 
 
Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss. Here he chooses nineteen of the greatest figures and presents their conversations, offering the reader intimacy with the artists and insight into their creative processes. Inspired by the great Vasari, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects explores the meaning of art and artists today, their varying approaches to creating, and a sense of how their thinking evolves over time. Including David Hockney, Gilbert and George, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Rem Koolhaas, and Oscar Niemeyer, this is a wonderful and unique book for those interested in modern art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator and writer. Since 2006 he has been co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. He is the author of Ways of Curating and, with Ai Weiwei, of Ai Weiwei Speaks.

Ways of Curating

One of the most colourful figures in the artworld today . . . Hans Ulrich Obrist [is] not so much a curator as a human whirlwind

An engaging and erudite work that argues persuasively for the continued relevance of curating for the arts and wider society. His book is about the curator's role as a maker of exhibitions, a task that involves tracing hidden connections between artworks and forging untrammelled routes across culture in search of new ways of experiencing art; new ways of looking at the world around us. If that sounds like an impossibly romantic definition it's because this is an unapologetically personal account of the profession's development

The sheer energy [Obrist] has brought to working with artists themselves is the abiding impression of Ways of Curating

This is a highly intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking book. Obrist emerges as both scholarly and energetically engaged with the proliferation of ideas in modern culture today

Drawing on his own experiences and inspirations - from staging his first exhibition in his tiny Zurich kitchen in 1986 to encounters with artists, exhibition makers and thinkers - Hans Ulrich Obrist looks to inspire all those engaged in the creation of culture. 
 
Moving from meetings with artists to the creation of the first public museums in the 18th century, recounting the practice of inspirational figures such as Diaghilev, skipping between exhibitions, continents and centuries, Ways of Curating argues that curation is far from a static practice. Driven by curiosity, at its best it allows us to create the future.

A Guide to the Extreme Present

The Age of Earthquakes

Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is it 
 
The future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would and this book explains why 
 
Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture The Medium is the Massage, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'. 
 
The Age of Earthquakes is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read. 
 
Welcome to The Age of Earthquakes, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

An email-like, culturally-perceptive exploration of our digital realities... a mix between a dystopian modern glossary, Internet memes, multiple-choice dropdowns, mindsourced images and a fair bit of wisdom, it is a self-help book for the "last generation that will die"

A philosophical Anarchist Cookbook for the online era, when we are in touch with everyone at once all the time, or like to feel that we are... Like Marshall McLuhan's iconic dictum "the medium is the message" or the staccato bursts of meaning of George W.S. Trow's essay-book In the Context of No Context, The Age of Earthquakes is an abstract representation of how we feel now about how we are now. It's a book insistently engaged with the present tense... Perhaps it is the 21st century's first book-meme

Many of us feel like technologies of the future are arriving too slowly, but a new philosophy-cum-modern-self-help book suggests that, in fact, it's dawning on us faster than we ever thought possible

A pocket-sized primer on our blossoming obsolescence

Age of Earthquakes = panic-inducingly addictive

It's a fun, visual and easy read. Verdict: In the future all books will be written this way

An abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world

I don't know about you but I would very much like a guide to this brave new world

Addictive... A fun read. But one that makes you question how you read, why you read and just how much the internet has restructured our brains... It is a book not only inspired by the internet, but seemingly written by the internet. It is as if the internet gained not only artificial self-consciousness but wisdom - and then became your pal

The Age of Earthquakes seeks to induce paradoxical visions of the contemporary, both ambivalent and critical

Life in Progress

He is a passionate communicator. In result, half the world is starting to live in the future now

His words come out in an almost comical torrent, citations bobbing up and ideas colliding... ArtReview named him the most powerful figure in the field, but Obrist seems less to stand atop the art world than to race around, up, over, and through it

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was a curator at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. 
 
Obrist's recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) and The Athens Dialogues (2018).

with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Ai Weiwei Speaks

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show "World Soup" (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. 
 
Obrist's recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) and The Athens Dialogues (2018).

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Kostas Stasinopoulos

Artists are uniquely situated to present new ideas about how we are living, the materials that make up our lives and how we can begin to work together to tackle the most urgent crisis of our time. 
 
Featuring Ed Ruscha's memorial plaques to trees that didn't make it, Judy Chicago's urge to make a mark and express a feeling, Jacob V Joyce and Rudy Loewe's activism flowchart, James Bridle's instructions to help plants along with their global velocity, Vivienne Westwood's plea for lockdown not to be lost, Olafur Eliasson's poetic wisdom to 'look up, look down', Marina Abramovic's performance art for the climate, and Rose Wylie's recipe for cooking for the environment, alongside many more.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Books by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Series by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Penguin Design

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter