The Chairman and Trustees of the Serpentine Galleries have announced that Elena Ochoa Foster has been appointed Chair of the Serpentine Galleries Council.
“We are honored 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,” Yana Peel, CEO, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, said in a statement.
“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.”
The Serpentine Council is an international group of supporters whose donations fund the Serpentine Galleries’ program and allow it to remain open to the public free of charge.
Ochoa Foster was born in Spain and made a name for herself as a professor of psychology with a specialty in sexuality, even participating in some radio and TV programs in Spain as such, before devoting herself to the worlds of art and culture.
In 1996, she married the architect Norman Foster and founded the publishing house Ivory Press in London, through which she has created limited edition artists’ books on Francis Bacon, Richard Tuttle, Anish Kapoor, Anthony Caro, and Richard Long, among others.
In 2009, Ochoa Foster opened the Ivory Press art gallery in Madrid, where she’s staged exhibitions of artists including Miroslav Tichý, Ai Weiwei, Conrad Shawcross, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and Julião Sarmento.
Ochoa Foster was 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 Isamu Noguchi Foundation.
She is currently immersed in the launch of the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, devoted to the study and archiving of Norman Foster’s body of work and to promote thinking and research among a new generation of architects.