The Whitechapel Gallery director, and most important woman in British art, Iwona Blazwick reflects on her four-decade rise – including the day she discovered Damien Hirst.
Iwona Blazwick is talking about the first time she saw a piece of work byDamien Hirst. Blazwick was a young curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and Hirst, a student at the time, had submitted one of his now-famous medicine cabinets to an open competition. “It was the fact that it was so squeaky clean, so brand new, so exquisitely realised,” she says. “The drugs inside it were also very particular. It was just extraordinary.” She pauses, then says, “Do you know, I could have bought it for a thousand quid – but I didn’t have a thousand quid! Even then, Damien was very specific about his prices.” With this she throws her head back and laughs.
Being the woman who discovered Hirst – she gave him his first solo show at a public art gallery – is just one of the many interesting things about Iwona Blazwick. As the director of the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, a position she has held for 13 years, she is often referred to as the most important woman in British art.
A respected curator, it was she who spotted the potential of not just Hirst but his YBA pals too, many of whom are still her friends. She played a vital role in the development of Tate Modern and its headline-grabbing installations. She is an outspoken champion of the arts, is the chair of the London Cultural Strategy Group, is on the advisory board of the Government Art Collection and was awarded an OBE in 2007 for services to art. She is also the person many people believe could succeed Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, in the country’s biggest job in art.
For someone with such a stellar career in a world often associated with hype and ego, Blazwick is remarkably understated. When we meet to talk about the Whitechapel’s latest exhibition of abstract art, Blazwick, 59, is wearing an appropriately minimalist black and white shift dress, her blond hair is loose and the only visible make-up is her magenta lipstick.
At first she seems rather earnest, scholarly even, but once she begins to talk about art she sparkles with energy and warmth. “I’m really, really excited about this show,” she says. “Although God knows what it will look like when it’s up.” She gives a low, throaty chuckle.
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| 2. Blazwick with Sir Antony Gormley |
Called “Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015”, it is the story of the legacy of geometric abstract art and is as close as the Whitechapel gets to a “blockbuster”. The show, which is co-curated by Blazwick, includes works by more than 100 artists including Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Its aim, Blazwick says, is to “challenge art history” and show that the influence of geometric abstract art was felt all over the world, from Soviet-era buildings to Ikea furniture.
Typically for the Whitechapel – and for Blazwick – it is offbeat and avant-garde. She grew up in south-east London, the child of Polish architects who both painted and who instilled in her a passion for art and design.
After studying English and fine art at Exeter University she worked at a publisher of art books and dabbled with becoming an artist herself, before realising she was better at writing about art and presenting it than making it (“a moment of wonderful clarity and the world was spared a very mediocre artist,” she has said). Today she lives in east London with her husband, Richard Noble, a lecturer in fine art, and their teenage daughter, Bella.
Blazwick cut her teeth as a curator at the ICA in the 1980s, where she worked with Sandy Nairne (now the director of the National Portrait Gallery), whom she describes as “visionary”. She went to New York, metCindy Sherman and gave Sherman her first solo show in Britain. She organised exhibitions of the then-young British sculptors Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor.
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| Sarah Lucas Whitechapel exhibition of 2013 |
As the director of exhibitions and displays at the Tate in the late 1990s, Blazwick was responsible for Tate Modern’s permanent collection being grouped thematically rather than chronologically, something that exasperated art critics. “At the time it was totally radical, but now everyone’s doing it,” she says, smiling.
Now in her fourth decade as a curator, Blazwick has witnessed the British art scene change beyond recognition. “I remember the exhibition opening of a major international artist when I was at the ICA in the 1980s, and there were a total of 20 people there, eight of whom were members of staff,” she says.
A decade later Blazwick found herself at the centre of a watershed. For many, Hirst has become a victim of his own success and is now often dismissed as a cynical, tiresome self-publicist. Blazwick, on the other hand, is very clear that not only was he gifted, but changed the British art scene for ever. “What Damien did, most shockingly for the art world, was to say, 'F— you, I’m not waiting. I’m not going to sit waiting for the ICA or the Serpentine or Whitechapel to come knocking at my door. I’m going to do it myself.’”
It was a time when, to the horror of many art critics, “conceptual art” staggered drunken and leering into the spotlight. In 1988 Hirst organised “Freeze”, an exhibition of his and his Goldsmiths contemporaries’ work at an empty Port of London Authority building. Blazwick says that, until then, artists waited until they were invited to exhibit, or, as she puts it, “the protocol was you worked alone in your studio with a steady northern light, perhaps copying from antiquities. To have anything to do with commercial galleries was seen as slightly corrupting.”
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