Iwona Blazwick: the high priestess of Whitechapel

There's a delicious game people like to play in the London art world: it's called Who Will Succeed Nicholas Serota at the Tate? One name always comes out on top: Iwona Blazwick. If you haven't heard of her then a quick résumé of her remarkable rise will leave you in no doubt of her credentials for the job. As a young curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) she was the first person to stage a solo show of Damien Hirst's work in a public gallery; later, as head of exhibitions and displays at Tate Modern, she was widely credited with initiating the annual Unilever commissions in the Turbine Hall. Most recently she has made her permanent mark on the London cultural landscape as director of the Whitechapel Gallery where, since she took over in 2001, she has overseen a £13.5 million expansion of the building to rejuvenate one of the city's best-loved and most vibrant centres for contemporary art.

As if her CV weren't enough, Blazwick is also extremely well connected. 'The art world is like a family,' she says of her group of friends, which includes Turner Prize-winner Rachel Whiteread and the Turner-shortlisted Cornelia Parker, as well as Antony Gormley and Gary Hume. Her husband, the Canadian philosopher Richard Noble, is head of fine art at Goldsmiths College, the art school that gave birth to the YBA movement. Is it any wonder that on ArtReview's recent list of the 100 most powerful people in the art world Blazwick was ranked at number 21, the highest-placed woman on the list and ahead of über-dealer Jay Jopling, collector Charles Saatchi and the world's most successful artist Jeff Koons?

Now 55, but looking ten years younger in a well-cut black dress – her favourite labels
are Prada and MaxMara – and a string of black beads, Blazwick traces her interest in art back to her childhood. She grew up in Blackheath, the daughter of Polish immigrant architects. 'Their coming of age was the Festival of Britain [in 1951],' she says. Blazwick remembers her childhood view from St Ursula's Convent School over Sir Christopher Wren's buildings in Greenwich and laments the rise of Canary Wharf and the surrounding corporate architecture. 'It's so phallic and dumb,' she says.

After studying English and fine art at Exeter University, she took a job in publishing while working as an artist in the evenings. She soon discovered that her talents lay more in presenting and writing about art than in making it and, after a stint at the Air Gallery, she became a junior curator at the ICA. This was in 1986 when the ICA's reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas was at its height. 'There were amazing conferences and speakers, I remember philosophers Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva came, and so you saw art and ideas together. I was a baby curator and I felt really privileged to be there.'

It was in 1991 that Blazwick's eye for spotting future stars became evident when she staged Damien Hirst's first public show. With its sculptures of cigarette ends and a colostomy bag in a glass case – price tag £12,000 – the exhibition grabbed headlines. Blazwick now credits Hirst with a large share in creating the boom in interest in contemporary art over the past 20 years. 'He started the whole thing with Freeze,' she says of the legendary exhibition Hirst curated in a Docklands warehouse in 1988. 'He wasn't going to hang around waiting to be discovered; he said, "F*** you, we'll do
it ourselves." '

It was during the heady years of the late 1980s and early 1990s that Blazwick pinpoints a shift in the character of art shows, as they moved out of the galleries into alternative spaces such as empty shops and industrial buildings. This proved an important influence on the way Blazwick later produced her own shows, favouring rough-hewn spaces over traditional white-walled galleries. 'The other big thing driving it all was alcohol,' she remembers. 'The Becks people would run around town and offer free drinks. That changed the first show I did at the Air Gallery from an exclusive soiree to a free-for-all; it was like having a street party.'

Blazwick spent the middle years of the 1990s working as a freelance curator and series editor of Phaidon's highly regarded monographs on contemporary artists. Then, in 1997, she was appointed head of exhibitions and displays at the Tate Gallery by Serota. It was during this time that Tate Modern was under development and she was responsible, along with other senior curators, for planning the thematic hang of the collection in the new building, as well as deciding how to fill the massive Turbine Hall.

'The architects gave us the challenge of how to use that space and it happened to coincide with this phenomenon of artists making site-specific work,' she explains. 'They were interested in working outside the white cube and really engaging with context, community, architectonics.' The outcome was the Unilever Series in which the space is given over each autumn to an individual artist to make a new piece. Two installations appeared in Blazwick's time at the Tate – Louise Bourgeois' spiral towers in 2000, and the mesmerising lift shafts installed by Juan Muñoz in 2001. These have since been followed by several big hits, including Olafur Eliasson's giant sunrise and Carsten Höller's helter-skelters. The space is now given over to Ai Weiwei's porcelain sunflower seeds.

In 2001, Blazwick, by now married to Noble and mother of a daughter, Bella, now ten, left the Tate to succeed Catherine Lampert as director of the Whitechapel. The prestige of the job stems from the history of the gallery, which opened in 1901 to bring art to the most deprived part of the city. Its fame, however, rests with the two periods in which it introduced important work to the public: first in the 1950s when the exhibition This is Tomorrow launched the careers of Pop Artists including Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi; and secondly in the 1980s when, under Serota's directorship, the Whitechapel staged influential shows by Gormley, the Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo and the American minimalist sculptor Carl Andre.

Blazwick's nine years at the gallery have been filled with frenetic activity. As well as the expansion programme, paid for partly by the Heritage Lottery Fund, partly with £2.5 million raised from an auction of work donated by Blazwick's artist friends, she has revived the gallery's reputation as the natural home of avant-garde ideas.

Since it reopened last year, exhibitions in the revamped, larger spaces have included an installation by the Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Goshka Macuga and, most recently, a
retrospective of the New York painter Alice Neel. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Blazwick's programme is the Bloomberg Commission, which, like the Unilever Series, is an annual opportunity for an artist to make a new work in the bare-brick space of the Whitechapel's Gallery 2. 'The cultural scene in this area is so hyperactive,' says Blazwick, looking out at the bustle on Whitechapel High Street. 'There are 104 galleries around here, so I wanted something slow, quiet, that you could come back to and that would resonate over time.'

The current Bloomberg Commission, an installation by Scottish artist Claire Barclay, is a baffling but beautiful arrangement of door frames, gold protuberances and dismembered gloves. Opening soon in the main galleries is a show of video and photographic work by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad, who claims to communicate with artists of the future via telepathic powers. Blazwick certainly can't be accused of staging dumbed-down crowd- pleasers, and yet the crowds flood in; visitor numbers for the past year total almost half a million, up 120 per cent on previous years.

What are the personal attributes that make Blazwick so successful? 'Iwona is a very sensitive person who knows how to talk to people,' explains Valeria Napoleone, an art collector and a judge on the MaxMara Prize for Women Artists, another Blazwick innovation at the Whitechapel. 'I meet many directors of galleries and some are good at raising money, others are good with artists. But Iwona is good at it all.' That, and her stamina: 'I threw a party,' continues Napoleone. 'And Iwona was dancing till 5am; she loves to dance.'