Ways of seeing
Director Paul Hobson shares his perspectives on Modern Art Oxford with Eleanor Mills as the gallery celebrates its 50th birthday
Modern Art Oxford has been holding exhibitions since 1966, having previously been a brewery. Paul Hobson follows in the footsteps of a number of high-profile directors, including current Tate boss Nicholas Serota and Sandy Nairne, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London.
As a former academic with a history degree from Oxford and two MAs, Hobson has the credentials to match the scholarly environment of the city. He took over after a difficult period for the gallery, in the aftermath of the previous director Michael Stanley’s untimely death.
“David Thorp stood in during the interim and did an amazing job of creating a holding pattern for the gallery,” says Hobson, a well-dressed, clean cut and intellectual yet personable man himself.
“When I took up the role, there was obviously a need to generate a programme, but also the need to stabilise an organisation that had gone through the trauma of Mike’s death as well as other resulting problems that came out of that,” says Hobson.
The finances needed immediate attention, he says, so over the past three years Hobson has steered the gallery back onto a sustainable course. Modern Art Oxford is free to visit, so has to raise money to help finance its exhibitions, events, workshops and tours from sources other than admissions.
“I’ve been focusing on growing the fundraising base for the gallery – it’s been a really big success story for us,” Hobson says. “Eighty to ninety per cent of my job is fundraising, talking to stakeholders and advocating for the gallery.”
He has lots of experience in fundraising having been the director of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) for six years.
“There was a need to raise the visibility of CAS as a charity and make it relevant to the contemporary art landscape,” he says. “It’s a completely different world now from when the charity was set up 100 years ago.”
The charity marked its centenary during his time there, and Hobson helped instigate its Annual Award for Museums, a £60,000 prize that supports a UK-based museum or public gallery to work with an artist of their choice to commission a new work that enters that museum’s permanent collection.
Setting up financial schemes comes part and parcel with running art institutions. Modern Art Oxford is supported by Arts Council England and Oxford City Council. The city council owns the gallery building so it gives a grant for the gallery to give it back as rent.
“We sort of get a free building, basically,” Hobson says. “But there is an underlying agreement that we’ll make provisions for local audiences, which of course we would do anyway, but it’s an important part of that transaction.”
Art for all
Hobson is keen to break down boundaries and take art to a wider range of people. “Not everyone ‘gets’ contemporary art, but a lot of people understand ideas,” he says. His aim for the gallery is to fuse the old and the new to create a really dynamic programme.
“Oxford is one of the world’s great centres for ideas and learning, so running a contemporary art gallery with that proximity is really exciting,” Hobson says. “We don’t just ask artists or curators to talk about an exhibition, we draw on the intellectual capital of the city and get astrophysicists, geneticists, biochemists and psychoanalysts to
talk instead.”
The gallery has a history of working with a range of different communities around Oxford, in particular those that are seen as being disadvantaged, such as Rose Hill and Blackbird Leys.
“The city is much more culturally diverse than people tend to think,” Hobson says. “I don’t want to promote the idea of Oxford just being this bastion of academia in a privileged intellectual position, because it’s a far more interesting place than that actually.”
Collegiate atmosphere
Modern Art Oxford has good relationships with Oxford University, Oxford Brookes and the Ruskin. And Hobson gets involved with regular college gigs, advising on collections, art history lectures, college dinners, as well as steering public art commissions in the city of Oxford.
But fundamentally Hobson is an ideas man, deeply into philosophy but also the study of contemporary life. He sees that the public now requires a degree of authorship in any activity they partake in, so he’s been trying to build a gallery programme modelled around co-authorship. The gallery runs a scheme called Test Run where the audience takes the spaces over for a month, putting on their own art and developing their own projects. It will restart in 2017 after the gallery’s big anniversary year.
Titled Kaleidoscope, Modern Art Oxford’s 50th birthday celebrations feature a series of rolling exhibitions running throughout 2016. With more than 700 exhibitions to its name since it opened, it would be impossible to tell a definitive history of the gallery.
“We wanted to create an exhibition that was innovative in format, and we had the idea of an evolving show where works come and go,” Hobson says.
The overarching theme of time was informed by the gallery’s archive: time, as a subject, is something that many of the artists who’ve shown there have tackled.
The public are able to watch each work being installed as one show gradually transforms into the next over the course of the year.
The first exhibition was The Indivisible Present, which ended in April. This included Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho – Hitchcock’s film slowed down to last 24 hours – first shown at the gallery in 1996. There was also Turner-prize winning Elizabeth Price’s video work Sleep, and an eerie audiovisual work by Pierre Huyghe that starts off looking like the universe, but ends up revealing itself as a mosquito trapped in amber.
“We want to give people the opportunity to experience, or re-encounter, the history of the gallery that they may not have been aware of, like the 1974 Joseph Beuys show here, and Marina Abramovic’s exhibition in 1995.” Works by both of these artists will make an appearance at the gallery this year.
It was John Latham’s show at the gallery in 1991, which Hobson saw as a history student at the university, that actually got him into art in the first place.
“Latham would burn a book just to show that he could – it was art as the idea of time,” Hobson says. “I didn’t understand it at all but, like all interesting art, it left me with more questions than answers.”
His first job was as a researcher at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre, London, before he moved on to become the head of the Royal Academy Trust at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Hobson became the head of strategy at the Serpentine Gallery, London, before running a private foundation that commissioned art for five years.
He then ran the Showroom Gallery, before becoming the director of the Contemporary Art Society for six years.
He has been the director of Modern Art Oxford since 2013.
The gallery is free to enter and gets about 140,000 visitors a year.
Modern Art Oxford runs on about £1.5m a year, with £850,000 of that coming from Arts Council England.
A grant of £70,000 from Oxford City Council pays rent for the building. In the past year there have been individual donations of £600,000.
There are about 30 staff, 100 individual patrons, and there will soon be a volunteer programme.
As a former academic with a history degree from Oxford and two MAs, Hobson has the credentials to match the scholarly environment of the city. He took over after a difficult period for the gallery, in the aftermath of the previous director Michael Stanley’s untimely death.
“David Thorp stood in during the interim and did an amazing job of creating a holding pattern for the gallery,” says Hobson, a well-dressed, clean cut and intellectual yet personable man himself.
“When I took up the role, there was obviously a need to generate a programme, but also the need to stabilise an organisation that had gone through the trauma of Mike’s death as well as other resulting problems that came out of that,” says Hobson.
The finances needed immediate attention, he says, so over the past three years Hobson has steered the gallery back onto a sustainable course. Modern Art Oxford is free to visit, so has to raise money to help finance its exhibitions, events, workshops and tours from sources other than admissions.
“I’ve been focusing on growing the fundraising base for the gallery – it’s been a really big success story for us,” Hobson says. “Eighty to ninety per cent of my job is fundraising, talking to stakeholders and advocating for the gallery.”
He has lots of experience in fundraising having been the director of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) for six years.
“There was a need to raise the visibility of CAS as a charity and make it relevant to the contemporary art landscape,” he says. “It’s a completely different world now from when the charity was set up 100 years ago.”
The charity marked its centenary during his time there, and Hobson helped instigate its Annual Award for Museums, a £60,000 prize that supports a UK-based museum or public gallery to work with an artist of their choice to commission a new work that enters that museum’s permanent collection.
Setting up financial schemes comes part and parcel with running art institutions. Modern Art Oxford is supported by Arts Council England and Oxford City Council. The city council owns the gallery building so it gives a grant for the gallery to give it back as rent.
“We sort of get a free building, basically,” Hobson says. “But there is an underlying agreement that we’ll make provisions for local audiences, which of course we would do anyway, but it’s an important part of that transaction.”
Art for all
Hobson is keen to break down boundaries and take art to a wider range of people. “Not everyone ‘gets’ contemporary art, but a lot of people understand ideas,” he says. His aim for the gallery is to fuse the old and the new to create a really dynamic programme.
“Oxford is one of the world’s great centres for ideas and learning, so running a contemporary art gallery with that proximity is really exciting,” Hobson says. “We don’t just ask artists or curators to talk about an exhibition, we draw on the intellectual capital of the city and get astrophysicists, geneticists, biochemists and psychoanalysts to
talk instead.”
The gallery has a history of working with a range of different communities around Oxford, in particular those that are seen as being disadvantaged, such as Rose Hill and Blackbird Leys.
“The city is much more culturally diverse than people tend to think,” Hobson says. “I don’t want to promote the idea of Oxford just being this bastion of academia in a privileged intellectual position, because it’s a far more interesting place than that actually.”
Collegiate atmosphere
Modern Art Oxford has good relationships with Oxford University, Oxford Brookes and the Ruskin. And Hobson gets involved with regular college gigs, advising on collections, art history lectures, college dinners, as well as steering public art commissions in the city of Oxford.
But fundamentally Hobson is an ideas man, deeply into philosophy but also the study of contemporary life. He sees that the public now requires a degree of authorship in any activity they partake in, so he’s been trying to build a gallery programme modelled around co-authorship. The gallery runs a scheme called Test Run where the audience takes the spaces over for a month, putting on their own art and developing their own projects. It will restart in 2017 after the gallery’s big anniversary year.
Titled Kaleidoscope, Modern Art Oxford’s 50th birthday celebrations feature a series of rolling exhibitions running throughout 2016. With more than 700 exhibitions to its name since it opened, it would be impossible to tell a definitive history of the gallery.
“We wanted to create an exhibition that was innovative in format, and we had the idea of an evolving show where works come and go,” Hobson says.
The overarching theme of time was informed by the gallery’s archive: time, as a subject, is something that many of the artists who’ve shown there have tackled.
The public are able to watch each work being installed as one show gradually transforms into the next over the course of the year.
The first exhibition was The Indivisible Present, which ended in April. This included Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho – Hitchcock’s film slowed down to last 24 hours – first shown at the gallery in 1996. There was also Turner-prize winning Elizabeth Price’s video work Sleep, and an eerie audiovisual work by Pierre Huyghe that starts off looking like the universe, but ends up revealing itself as a mosquito trapped in amber.
“We want to give people the opportunity to experience, or re-encounter, the history of the gallery that they may not have been aware of, like the 1974 Joseph Beuys show here, and Marina Abramovic’s exhibition in 1995.” Works by both of these artists will make an appearance at the gallery this year.
It was John Latham’s show at the gallery in 1991, which Hobson saw as a history student at the university, that actually got him into art in the first place.
“Latham would burn a book just to show that he could – it was art as the idea of time,” Hobson says. “I didn’t understand it at all but, like all interesting art, it left me with more questions than answers.”
Paul Hobson at a glance
With a degree in history from Oxford University, Paul Hobson went on to study an MA in culture, policy and management at City University London. He studied another MA, in aesthetics and art theory at Middlesex University.His first job was as a researcher at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre, London, before he moved on to become the head of the Royal Academy Trust at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Hobson became the head of strategy at the Serpentine Gallery, London, before running a private foundation that commissioned art for five years.
He then ran the Showroom Gallery, before becoming the director of the Contemporary Art Society for six years.
He has been the director of Modern Art Oxford since 2013.
Modern Art Oxford at a glance
Founded by Trevor Green as the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, the gallery opened in 1966. In 2002 the gallery changed its name to just Modern Art Oxford.The gallery is free to enter and gets about 140,000 visitors a year.
Modern Art Oxford runs on about £1.5m a year, with £850,000 of that coming from Arts Council England.
A grant of £70,000 from Oxford City Council pays rent for the building. In the past year there have been individual donations of £600,000.
There are about 30 staff, 100 individual patrons, and there will soon be a volunteer programme.