Elena Ochoa Foster, Chair of the Council of the Serpentine Galleries
19/01/2017.
[LON] UK
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
Elena Ochoa Foster has been elected as the new Chair of the Serpentine Galleries Council, London, UK.
Elena Ochoa. Photograph © Salva López. Courtesy Ivorypress
Elena Ochoa Foster at Ivorypress
The Serpentine Council is its premier circle of supporters, comprised of international leaders from a variety of backgrounds. Council members’ donations and support enables the Serpentine Galleries to remain open to the public free of charge and to deliver its acclaimed art, architecture, design, education and public programmes.
Championing new ideas in contemporary art since it opened in 1970, the Serpentine Galleries has presented pioneering exhibitions of 2,263 artists over 45 years, showing a wide range of work from emerging practitioners to the most internationally recognised artists and architects of our time.
Championing new ideas in contemporary art since it opened in 1970, the Serpentine Galleries has presented pioneering exhibitions of 2,263 artists over 45 years, showing a wide range of work from emerging practitioners to the most internationally recognised artists and architects of our time.
Yana Peel, chief executive, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries said:
“We are honoured and delighted that our long-standing collaborator Lady Foster will be assuming the Chairmanship of the Serpentine Council, the Galleries’ core community of supporters and friends. Elena’s outstanding support of artists as publisher and patron make her an excellent champion and the ideal ambassador for our ambitions – to bring multiple worlds together in an open landscape for art and ideas in the heart of Kensington Gardens.”
Elena Ochoa Foster Elena Ochoa Foster is a publisher, curator and the founder of Ivorypress, a private initiative that includes a publishing house specialising in artists’ books, an art gallery, and a bookshop focused on photography contemporary art and architecture. She is a member of the board of art directors at the Mutual Art Trust and serves on the advisory board of the Prix Pictet photography award. She has been president of the jury at the Swiss photography award, Alt+1000, president of the Tate International Council for five years, and a member of the board of directors of both the Tate Foundation, from 2004 to 2008, and the Noguchi Foundation. As a patron, she supports a variety of museums and foundations including El Museo del Prado and El Teatro Real, Madrid, Spain, alongside several international schools of contemporary art and photography.
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Elena OCHOA
Elena Ochoa (Lady Elena Foster of Thames Bank) was born in Orense (Spain) in 1958. For more than twenty years, she held the position of Professor of Psychopathology at the Complutense University of Madrid, and until 2001 was Honorary Professor at King’s College, London. In the course of her academic career, she has been Hispanic/North American Fulbright scholar at the University of California and, as Visiting Professor, conducted research at numerous universities in Europe as well as in he United States, among them Cambridge, Chicago, Cracow, Hamburg and Pennsylvania. She has worked at Spanish public broadcasters TVE and Radio Nacional, and has been a regular contributor to various newspapers.
In 1996, Elena Ochoa Foster founded Ivorypress publishing house. She directs the C Photo Project, conceived to promote photography and contemporary art through publications, exhibitions and academic and institutional support (Ivorypress has organised the creation of a Chair of Contemporary Art at the University of Oxford, among its other sponsorships at different academic institutions). Along with the team at Ivorypress, she has curated international exhibitions, such as C on Cities (10th Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2006), NY C (Phillips de Pury, New York, 2007), Blood on Paper (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2008) and Real Venice(54th Venice Biennale, 2011 and Somerset House, London, 2011). She is member of the Board of Directors of the Mutual Art Trust and the Prix Pictet Photography Prize. She was President of the Tate International Council and member of the Governing Board of the Tate Foundation between 2004 and 2008, as well as Trustee of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation. She serves as patron of diverse museums, foundations and international schools of contemporary art and photography.
