Paul Hobson, director of Modern Art Oxford, on how art can be inspiring, beautiful, challenging and unsettling

Last autumn, I returned to the city of my student years to take up the position of director of Modern Art Oxford. The gallery is one of the UK’s leading contemporary art spaces with an international reputation for groundbreaking, world-class exhibitions. I was delighted at the prospect of returning to a city which I have such fond memories of, and which has played an important role in shaping my experiences and my career.

Returning to Oxford, I was struck again by the intellectual life around the university and the mixture of radical and pioneering thinking that is generated both in and beyond the walls of the university in city museums, businesses and cultural organisations. I’ve also enjoyed rediscovering the rich mix of communities here, which offer such a great opportunity for Modern Art Oxford as a local gallery with a national and international mandate.

Being located in one of the world’s great centres for thinking and ideas — with not just one but two great universities — is of enormous value for the gallery and the artists we work with. Art has the capacity to speak to all and any of us in radically different ways if we can be open to it and not worry always about ‘getting things right’. The more we can invite people to experience art, the more relevant it becomes to everyday life, and this could not be of greater importance than to the artists with whom we work.

Art’s peculiar ability to be appreciated in very many different ways depending on our experiences means that it plays the vital function in society of enabling us to have an experience of our self and others as well as the object we are appreciating. It can offer social insights that are revealing and this value of artists as agents in society is important. The consequence of all this is that art can be inspiring and beautiful, challenging and unsettling in equal measure.

I realise in writing this that many might disagree. However, for many artists, contemporary art is research in a visual form that asks questions about our-selves and our own times. Art is no longer simply painting, sculpture and drawing — the techniques of previous centuries — it is all the visual materials that make up our environment and shape our lives in the second decade of the 21st century. We should not be surprised to find an artist today creating a sculpture combining magazine photocopies, iPads playing clips from YouTube and structures formed through 3D printing — as well as using the entire history of art and culture as a scrapbook from which to draw inspiration. These are the material conditions of the contemporary and are employed by artists to talk about the now.

Of course, this means that contemporary art is often not easy and many people find forms of art being produced today perplexing and even off-putting. This is a great shame since this feeling of being lost is often the exact moment when an art work is beginning to talk to us. In the gap of momentary incomprehension, we discover ourselves in our time.

Working with artists from around the world to develop exhibitions in the unique context of Oxford also provides fantastic opportunities for dialogue with ideas from other disciplines and perspectives, expert and inexpert, and this is what makes Modern Art Oxford a really exciting place for artists and audiences to come together.