Alex Farquharson, the director of Nottingham Contemporary, has been appointed as director of Tate Britain in London. He replaces Penelope Curtis who takes up the post of director of the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Portugal this autumn.
Farquharson has been director of Nottingham Contemporary since 2007, two years before its launch. He organised several shows at the regional gallery including Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou in 2012, and solo exhibitions dedicated to David Hockney, Frances Stark, Huang Yong Ping and Wael Shawky. In an ambitious move, he co-organised the show Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions with Tate Liverpool this year. Nottingham Contemporary drew almost 200,000 visitors from 2014 to 2015 (financial year).
Before Nottingham Contemporary, Farquharson was exhibitions director at Spacex in Exeter and the now defunct Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff. He also taught on the curating contemporary art postgraduate master's course at the Royal College of Art in London from 2001 to 2007, curated the British Art Show 6 in 2005, and sits on the Arts Council Collection’s acquisitions committee.
The art critic of The Observer, Laura Cumming, tweeted that Farquharson is a “fine curator, writer and risk-taker… roll on the good, new future”. Waldemar Januszczak, the art critic of The Sunday Times, tweeted that the new director has a “good contemporary past” but doesn’t “know about his scholarship [record]”.
The Argentine artist Pablo Bronstein, who has worked with Farquharson, says that “he is extremely passionate about art from pretty much every period, and talking to him is more like talking to a fellow artist than a typical art-world politician.”
Curtis, who became director of Tate Britain in 2010, oversaw the £45m refurbishment of the gallery of historic and contemporary British art. A number of Tate Britain’s exhibitions held during her tenure, including the recent show Sculpture Victorious, aroused the ire of some critics.