Iwona Blazwick

Iwona Maria Blazwick OBE (born 14 October 1955) is a British art critic and lecturer.

She is currently the Chair of the Royal Commission for Al-'Ula’s Public Art Expert Panel.

She also wrote the introduction for Talking Art: Interviews with Artists Since 1976, published by Ridinghouse and Art Monthly and featuring the best interviews from the latter's 30-year run.

Blazwick is series editor of Documents of Contemporary Art; co-published with MIT Press these anthologies bring together the most important texts by artists, critics and historians on the big themes in art today, ranging from Participation to Failure.

Blazwick chaired the Cultural Strategy Group at London's City Hall, appointed by Mayor Boris Johnson.

She also served on the advisory boards of the Government Art Collection; Sculpture in the City; and the Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Commission.

Her first exhibition was, Objects and Sculpture (1981), which included work by artists Bill Woodrow, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley.

From 1984 to 1986, Blazwick was Director of AIR Gallery, London.

From 1986 to 1993, she was Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, where she curated exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

She discovered Damien Hirst and staged his first solo show at a public London art gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1992.

She supports the careers of young artists.

From 1993 to 1997, Blazwick was a commissioning editor for contemporary art at Phaidon.

She also 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.

Blazwick has sat on several art prize juries, including for the Turner Prize (1993), the Jerwood Painting Prize (1997), the 2002 Wexner Prize (as a member of Ohio's Wexner Center's International Arts Advisory Council), the Clark Prize for Writing (2010/12), the Menil Collection's Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement (2011) and the John Moores Painting Prize (2012).

From 1997 to 2001, Blazwick was Curator and then Head of Exhibitions at Tate Modern.

There she co-conceived a new model for the display of the Collection and a blueprint for the museum's future program, including the Turbine Hall commissions.

She co-curated the inaugural display and the groundbreaking exhibition 'Century City.' Blazwick was responsible for Tate Modern's permanent collection becoming grouped thematically, rather than chronologically.

She was the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 2001 to 2022.

From 2001, Blazwick served as the Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

She is series editor of Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Documents of Contemporary Art.

In 2022, Blazwick announced she was stepping down as director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London after two decades.

She remained emeritus curator until 2023.

Since June 2022, Blazwick has been serving as the Chair of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Royal Commission for Al-'Ula’s Public Art Expert Panel, overseeing the large-scale, site-specific commissions planned for the Wadi AlFann area located in the vast northwest region of the archaeological and historical site in Saudi Arabia.

When the Istanbul Biennial’s advisory board unanimously chose Defne Ayas as curator for the event’s 2024 edition, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) rejected the board’s recommendation and instead appointed Blazwick; at the time of her selection, Blazwick was a serving member of the advisory panel tasked with choosing a curator for the biennial.

Responding to public criticism, Blazwick stepped down in early 2024.

Blazwick has written monographs and articles on many contemporary artists and published extensively on themes and movements in modern and contemporary art, exhibition histories and art institutions.

Blazwick was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to art in 2008.

She is married to Richard Noble, the Canadian philosopher and fine art lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London.

Blazwick was brought up in Blackheath, South East London.

She is the child of Polish architects who both painted and inspired her passion for art and design.

Her family name is Błaszczyk, but she later changed the spelling as she found people could not pronounce it or misspelled it.

Blazwick studied English and Fine Art at Exeter University. She wrote her university thesis on Henry Moore.

After university, Blazwick was hired as a receptionist for a pop art prints and books publisher.

She became an assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, under the tutelage of Sandy Nairne, who is a former director of the National Portrait Gallery.

Her writings include monographs on Gary Hume (Other Criteria, 2012) and Cornelia Parker (Thames and Hudson, 2013); and contributions to monographs and exhibition catalogues on Hannah Collins, Keith Coventry, Elmgreen and Dragset, Fischli and Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Katharina Fritsch, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Alex Katz, Paul McCarthy, Cornelia Parker, Annie Ratti, Hannah Starkey, Lawrence Weiner and Rachel Whiteread; and anthologies including Fresh Cream in 2001.

She was editor of the Tate Modern: The Handbook and Century City.

Blazwick also writes art criticism for numerous periodicals.

She contributes occasional reviews and commentaries for BBC and Channel Four television and BBC radio.

She was part of the juries that selected Helen Cammock as recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2018 and Nalini Malani as recipient of the Joan Miró Prize in 2019.

She is a standing member of the jury for Film London's Jarman Award.