Iwona Blazwick
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Iwona Blazwick OBE is director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, England. Until 2001, she was head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Modern, where she was responsible for co-curating the installation of the collection and formulating the exhibitions programme. From 1993 to 1997, Iwona Blazwick worked as an independent curator for museums and major public arts projects in Europe and Japan, devising surveys of contemporary artists and commissioning new works of art. During this period she was also Commissioning Editor for Contemporary Art at Phaidon Press where she created the ongoing book series, Contemporary Artists Monographs and Themes and Movements. From 1986 to 1993 she was Director of Exhibitions at London’s ICA where she curated exhibitions of modern and contemporary art; and from 1984 to 1986 she was Director of the AIR Gallery.
Exhibitions she has curated include monographic shows of Katharina Fritsch, (Tate Modern) Art and Language, Willie Doherty, Peter Halley, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Ilya Kabakov, Barbara Kruger, Meret Oppenheim, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Gerhard Richter, Rosemarie Trockel and Lawrence Weiner, (ICA). Group exhibitions, often curatorial collaborations, include Objects and Sculpture, Possible Worlds, True Stories, (ICA); On Taking a Normal Situation … (MUHKA, Antwerp), Body of Evidence, (Toyama Museum of Modern Art, Japan) Ha-Ha, (Killerton Park, Devon), Now Here: Work in Progress (Louisiana Museum, Denmark) and Performing Bodies (Tate Modern).
Iwona Blazwick was visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and teaches occasionally at Goldsmith's School of Art, Central St. Martins, Middlesex University, the Slade School and Sothebys MA Course; in addition she has taught at academies in Hamburg, Malmö and Vienna.
Her writings have also been published extensively; they include contributions to monographs on Hannah Collins, Ceal Floyer, Katharina Fritsch, Ilya Kabakov, Cornelia Parker, Lawrence Weiner and Rachel Whiteread, among others; and anthologies such as Fresh Cream in 2001. She was editor of the Tate Modern Handbook and Century City and writes art criticism for numerous periodicals.
She is also a broadcaster contributing occasional reviews and commentaries for BBC and Channel Four television and BBC radio.
Iwona Blazwick has been on numerous juries including the Turner Prize in 1993, the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1997 and as a member of Ohio’s Wexner Center’s International Arts Advisory Council, the Wexner Prize for 2002.
She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.
