Vicente Todoli

Since May 2002 the Director of London’s prestigious art gallery, The Tate Modern, has been a Valencian.

Vicente Todoli's career in the visual arts spans 20 years, and includes positions such as the former Chief Curator (1986-88) and then Artistic Director of IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) 1988-96, before joining the Museu Serralves as its founding Director in 1996. He has been actively involved with many other international art institutions including the ICA Amsterdam and the Reina Sofia National Museum of Art in Madrid where he was a member of the Advisory Committees of both museums. In addition, he was member of the jury and the Advisory Committee of the 1995 Carnegie International and he was an adviser for Future, Past, Present (curated by Germano Celant) at the 1997 Venice Biennale. He has also served on the Commission which reviews potential acquisitions for, and advises the Director of, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and is a member of the Board for the European biennial exhibition, Manifesta.

Throughout his career he has organised and curated internationally renowned exhibitions of work by contemporary artists, such as John Baldessari (1989), James Rosenquist (1991), Richard Tuttle (1992), Tony Cragg (1992), Juan Muñoz (1992), Julião Sarmento (1994) and Pedro Cabrita Reis (1996). At the Museu Serralves, he has curated exhibitions of James Lee Byars, Franz West, Gary Hill, Hamish Fulton, Lothar Baumgarten, Roni Horn, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, as well as preparing exhibitions on the work of Richard Hamilton/Dieter Roth and Francis Bacon.

At Tate Modern Vicente curated exhibitions of Sigmar Polke in 2004 and Robert Frank in 2005.

He was born, the eldest of four children, in Palmera, Valencia, a small village surrounded by orange groves, in 1958. In fact his father apparently used to talk to the trees, asking them what they needed. His background includes graduate studies in art history as a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University and City University of New York. He received an ISP Fellowship from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1985.

Vicente was previously Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal and commented: “Tate Modern has been one of the great successes of the last five years and has changed the London art scene forever. Having had the privilege of setting up and opening the Serralves Museum in Porto, architecturally one of the most important new museums in Europe, I look forward to the challenge of taking Tate Modern forward into the next decade. I am fortunate to be joining such a dynamic team and look forward to working closely with Tate staff”.

Tate Director, Nicholas Serota said: “It is really exciting that we have been able to attract a director of such evident talent and distinction. Vicente Todoli has run one of the most successful new contemporary art museums to have opened in Europe in the last five years and his appointment demonstrates that today’s art world is truly international”.

When Vicente wishes to leave the stress of London behind him, his retreat is back in Valencia, in the peacful Valle de Gallinera in Alicante province, a place of olives, vines and cherry trees, where he spends weekends and summers with a group of  artistic friends.