Hans-Ulrich Obrist Quotes

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

I see artists bored by light-without-heat, irked at gigantic galleries' pushing out art-as-product, leaving behind the over determined for the undetermined, guided by interior voices and bringing us out of a long tunnel to new blueness.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

I'm constantly exposing myself to art and that inspires me.

From 17 to 21, I was obsessed by sport and art. In art, I loved the pre-Raphaelites and Rembrandt first. Then I discovered Salvador Dali, and it was like finding something I already knew.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

One of the things I think about as I've evolved as an architect is, 'Where do the poetic impulses come from?'

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it's a different way of expression, a different field of art. They're not separated; everything for me is related.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

I look at a lot of artists. I'm inspired by - I suppose I shouldn't say 'inspired,' but it's not really influenced. I am inspired. Art comes from art.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

You really can't bring about anything new with art.

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.