Gregor Muir as new executive director of the ICA

The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London has appointed Gregor Muir as executive director. 

www.guardian.co.uk 11 Jan 2011

 

The Institute of Contemporary Arts (today) appointed the experienced and well-connected gallerist Gregor Muir as its new executive director after a rocky year which saw an executive clearout.
Muir, who went from the "young British artists" (YBA) scene to curating at Tate before becoming director of one of the world's leading galleries, Hauser & Wirth, will formally take charge on 7 February.
The ICA has been in turmoil for more than a year with financial problems so bad that, at one stage, it was threatened with closure. Ekow Eshun, its executive director since 2005, announced his resignation in August, along with the chair, Alan Yentob.
Eshun left on 30 November, before the end of his six-month notice period, and the new ICA chair, Alison Myners, has led the search for a replacement leader at a particularly important time for arts organisations. The ICA receives around £1.4m from Arts Council England and, like other funded organisations, it is having to re-apply for money in a new funding structure.
The council's executive director for London, Moira Sinclair, welcomed the appointment of Muir. "He has a wealth of experience as a curator and director, and with his passion and knowledge of contemporary art, he will be a valuable asset to the ICA."
Muir said he was delighted to be taking over.
"Since my first visit to the ICA as a student in the 1980s, I have become tremendously attached to this unique and inspiring institution," he said. "As Sir Roland Penrose, co-founder of the ICA, said in 1968, the role of the ICA is 'stimulating interest in the works of artists and ideas formerly unfamiliar to us.'
"Now more than ever, the ICA is needed to give artists a voice, allowing them to display their work while exploring new ideas in a welcoming environment. I very much look forward to being a part of the ICA's future."
Myners said Muir was held in great esteem by artists and his peers. "He brings to the ICA many years of experience from both public and private sectors at a time when knowledge of both is so important. Gregor will once again place artists at the heart of the ICA, making it a forum for new ideas and discussion, exciting audiences and restoring the ICA as a destination."
Muir is the author of Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, part memoir, part history of an art movement in which he concedes he was an early YBA groupie.
He desperately wanted to be one of them but writes that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time: "Had I not spent so much time partying at Camberwell and defected to Goldsmiths instead – where my contemporaries Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume and others had graduated – I could have been up there with the best of them."
Instead, Muir made his name as a gallerist and curator. In 1997 he founded the Lux Gallery in Shoreditch, east London, and staged early shows for artists such as c and the twins Jane and Louise Wilson.
That same year he co-curated a show at the ICA called Assuming Positions, which included work by Jorge Pardo and Tobias Rehberger.
Muir went on to work at Tate, co-curating a show at Tate Britain, In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, which displayed work by Hirst, Lucas and Angus Fairhurst. He rose further up the art ladder in 2004 when he was appointed director of the international gallery Hauser & Wirth.