Heidi Grundmann

Heidi Grundmann was born on 18 July 1938 in Innsbruck, Austria. She studied psychology and, alongside her studies, acted with the Innsbruck theatre group Theater im Zentrum 107. Through the group she met several staff members of the ORF studio in Tyrol, which opened the way to a career in broadcasting.

In 1963 Grundmann became an announcer at ORF Radio Wien, which fulfilled an early wish of hers. In 1967 she moved to London to work for the German service of the BBC. She returned to Austria in 1969 and in 1972 joined Österreich 1, the cultural channel of ORF, as a cultural editor. Over more than 25 years at ORF she worked as a cultural reporter, art and theatre critic, editor and programme producer.

In 1976 she founded Kunst heute, a programme about international contemporary visual art that included a segment called Kunst zum Hören, art for listening. In 1987 this developed into Kunstradio - Radiokunst, which first went on air on 3 December 1987. She led it until the autumn of 1998 and continued to co-curate it afterwards. The programme did not simply report on art: it offered artists of every discipline the medium of radio itself, and its technical resources, as a place to make their work. In its first 25 years it gave airtime to more than a thousand Austrian and international artists, working in visual art, literature, media art, music, performance and net art.

In the 1970s she had met artists in the United States, Australia and Canada who called themselves radio artists and explored the space opened up by new electronic communications. Among them was the Canadian media artist Robert Adrian X, founder of the ARTEX network, who later became her husband and helped shape Kunstradio from the start. Together they realised networked projects including Horizontal Radio (1995), Rivers and Bridges (1996), Sound Drifting (1999) and Re-Inventing Radio (2004). In 1995 the programme launched Kunstradio On Line, a site for art and an archive at kunstradio.at.

From the early 1980s she curated exhibitions, including the video section of Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn at the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna in 1985, Zeitgleich at the Kunsthalle Tirol in 1994 and Art on Air at the Weserburg museum in Bremen in 2008. From 1984 she organised international symposia and conferences, lectured and wrote on art and new media. She edited publications including Art + Telecommunication (1984), The Geometry of Silence (1991), On the Air (1993), Zeitgleich (1994), Sound Drifting (2000) and, with Dieter Daniels and Elisabeth Zimmermann, Re-inventing Radio: Aspects of Radio as Art (2008).

She sat on the music jury of the Berlin DAAD artists programme and on the Austrian federal jury for visual arts, and coordinated Ars Acustica, the radio art working group of the European Broadcasting Union.

Grundmann lived in Vienna. She was married to the Canadian born artist Robert Adrian X, a pioneer of telecommunications art, who was her partner in many of her radio art projects. He died in 2015. In some reports of her death she was named Heidi Grundmann-Smith.

Heidi Grundmann died in Vienna on 27 October 2026, aged 88. Her death was announced by Ö1 on 28 October 2026 and reported by Der Standard. The cause of death was not made public.

In its tribute Ö1 described her as open, well informed and always ready to push the apparent limits of public broadcasting and of radio itself into other spaces and media, and said that with persistence, sometimes extraordinary alliances and unshakeable faith in the artists she so often made the impossible possible.

Grundmann is regarded as a pioneer of radio art. The Kunstradio format she conceived, sometimes called the Vienna Kunstradio model, treated radio as something that happens where it is received rather than in the studio, and it was taken up by broadcasters elsewhere, including in Canada. Ö1 said her projects shaped the way many artists in Austria and around the world worked with media and art. In 2012 the Weserburg museum in Bremen marked 25 years of Kunstradio with the exhibition Über das Radio hinaus.

Her honours included the critics' prize of the galleries in 1983 for Kunst heute, the Andreas Reischek Ring in 1998 and the Werkstadt Graz prize in 2000. She was an honorary member of AICA Austria, the Austrian section of the International Association of Art Critics.