Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the art world’s great curators, is more deeply connected with artists than most could dream: he has estimated that he’s recorded over 2,000 hours worth of interviews with artists, and he regularly posts handwritten notes from painters, sculptors, and filmmakers whose studios he’s visited.
But one artist has regularly refused his requests for a studio visit, and that artist is one of the most secretive painters still alive today.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Obrist said that he has never been able to successfully get a studio visit with Jasper Johns, the painter most famous for Flag, his 1954–55 work depicting an American flag in encaustic.
Asked by journalist Kelly Crow who turned down his request for a studio visit, Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, said that he had “tried” to see Johns’s workspace, “but he doesn’t see anyone.”
Obrist was on hand to tout his memoir, Life in Progress, which releases in the US this week. That book covers the lengths to which Obrist has often gone to affirm his ties with artists, something that has led him to all corners of Europe, and even beyond.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, for example, Obrist recalled his time with Sigmar Polke, a famed German painter. “He didn’t have a telephone number, so I was just waiting for eight hours in front of his door until he came home,” Obrist said. “I was like 17, and I sat behind the railway station, you know, kind of on the stairs of this studio in a courtyard. And then he showed up, and we had this amazing conversation about alchemy.”
That sort of drive may explain why Obrist seemed to want to keep trying to visit Johns, who is now 95. Of his failed attempts to visit him, Obrist said, “I think it’s good. We should all have a few unrealized projects.”
