Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson: 'I have a duty to lead people to the unfamiliar'

Alex Farquharson is a man on a mission. As the director of Tate Britain he is determined that Brexit will not turn his museum into a parochial backwater. Instead, he argues, “it has created an environment in which the exploration of issues of belonging and identity are all the more pressing. It certainly won’t make Tate Britain any less international.”

In terms of exhibitions and displays this campaign will be a subtle one, as his announcement this morning of Tate Britain’s 2018 programme reveals. One of the main shows will be about figurative art in London since the mid-20th century; another is a blockbuster on the Pre-Raphaelite painter Burne-Jones. Neither seems the most obvious way to promote an image of internationalism. But this broader story, he explains later, is in the details.

When we meet to discuss the new programme Farquharson is buzzing with enthusiasm. This is his first newspaper interview since he started the job 18 months ago but he has already made his mark. The David Hockney retrospective has been a huge success, with opening hours extended to midnight this weekend.

The Queer British Art show in the lower galleries has divided critics but Farquharson is pleased with the positive response it has had from the LGBT community and uses the pairing to illustrate his approach to exhibition planning. “One has a duty to lead people from the familiar to the unfamiliar,” he says. “The breadth and newness of the programme is as important as the presentation of household names.”

​Farquharson, 47, knows a thing or two about newness. In his previous job he was director of Nottingham Contemporary, where he oversaw the completion of one of Britain’s largest spaces for contemporary art, which he ran for eight years. Before that he worked as a freelance curator and writer.

He is not an art historian by training and came to curating via a degree in English and fine art at Exeter and an MA in arts criticism at City University. As a regular contributor to Frieze magazine he is firmly established in its orbit and in the East End art scene which it did so much to cultivate.

For 10 years he has owned a flat in Bethnal Green (he spent weekends in London during his years at Nottingham Contemporary) and has observed first-hand how the capital’s art scene has changed. “I remember a time when you could see what was going on in contemporary art in London in a day or two. Now it would take all week.”

With his easygoing charm, Farquharson stands in contrast to Tate Britain’s previous director, Penelope Curtis, a scholarly but less touchy-feely boss. While Curtis’s displays were crisp and chronological, Farquharson is keen to explore the messy business of how every aspect of British life manifests itself in art, gayness currently being the most obvious example.

As well as Queer British Art and the Hockney exhibition, the main display in the Duveen galleries is by Cerith Wyn Evans, a veteran of the Eighties gay club scene. The outside of the building is floodlit in pink and this year’s Pride festival will be launched at the gallery next month. There will even be a Tate float in the parade. The message of inclusion couldn’t be more positive but just in case anybody is wondering, Farquharson says Tate Britain’s coming-out celebration is “not a directorial self-portrait”.

Indeed, his desire to explore other less mainstream movements in British art is also evident in his commitment to show more work by black and minority ethnic artists. You can see this interest in the rooms where displays from the collection have recently been rehung.

As well as work by younger black artists such as Chris Ofili and Steve McQueen, there is a 1982 painting by Denzil Forrester, a Caribbean artist who moved to England in 1967. “That Eighties generation made work that in a very direct way tackled the experience of race,” says Farquharson. “The issues are different now but to write them into the story is important.”

Plans are now being made to rehang the entire collection in a thematic way. “So there could be big themes, like London as an urban space in the 18th century or Britain in the post-war age of anxiety. We want to look at how social factors caused art to take the forms it did.” Labels, reduced to a bare minimum during Curtis’s reign, will once again offer interpretation of the works. “If one frames art that way it’s an invitation to an audience to understand the work without prior knowledge of art historical categories,” says Farquharson.

Other changes under the director include the rebooting of the Turner Prize, which for the first time this year was also open to artists aged over 50. The change, he says, is reflected “in the fact that it’s the most diverse Turner Prize ever”, with shortlisted artists including Hurvin Anderson, 52, a painter of Jamaican descent, and Lubaina Himid, 62, born in Tanzania.

Farquharson concedes that his tireless campaign for art to be accessible and inclusive is partly a reaction to his privileged childhood in Buckinghamshire, where he went to boarding school at Stowe. “I was always aware of how extraordinary that experience was and how unrepresentative it was,” he says, “but I guess the inspiration it gave me was as much reacting against it as embracing what it offered.”

​Farquharson has a busy year ahead. Next week Maria Balshaw starts as the new overall director of Tate, replacing Nicholas Serota who leaves after 29 years in the job. Farquharson knows Balshaw from their interactions as regional museum directors and says he’s excited to be working with her.

Then, in September, Tate Britain will stage a retrospective by sculptor Rachel Whiteread. Further ahead, he is excited about a solo show by the 2008 Turner Prize-winner Mark Leckey, which will be programmed in 2019 against a major William Blake exhibition.

Finally we return to the question of Tate Britain’s role in the age of Brexit. The important thing, says Farquharson, is to show how culture in Britain has always been open to exchange. In displays from the collection this means highlighting the impact of émigré artists (“we cover 500 years of British art here, and the first 200 years is largely by artists from the continent”) and showing the impact of British artists abroad.

Several of the shows in the programme illustrate how this can be done in exhibitions. In November, Impressionists in London will examine the work of French artists who sought refuge here during the Franco-Prussian war. “The paintings show things that are familiar to us — smog, the Thames — but seen through the foreign eyes of people trying to make a home here,” says Farquharson. The show will include a room devoted to six paintings of the Houses of Parliament by Claude Monet. The approach continues in the 2018 programme, with the Burne-Jones exhibition highlighting “the huge influence he had on European symbolism”.

Maybe the best showcase to make the point about the ongoing relationship between British art and the wider world will be All Too Human, a show devoted to figurative painting in Britain since the mid-20th century. The focus will be on a group known as the School of London artists, including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. As Farquharson points out, both artists came from Germany to escape persecution and what we now think of as their quintessentially British views are informed by their experience of diaspora.

In addition to these well known names, the show will feature work by FN Souza, an Indian artist who moved to London in 1949. Paula Rego, born in Portugal in 1935, will also be included. The show will come up to date with work by four women artists, including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a painter of Ghanaian descent.

As Farquharson points out, all these artists can be seen as part of a distinctively British movement, but the key to the future, he says, is “to keep this category of Britishness elastic.”

Are you a budding artist? Enter the Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize in association with Hiscox and you could win £10,000. Visit standard.co.uk/artprize