The Ben Uri Gallery is pleased to announce the appointment of Richard Aronowitz-Mercer as the new Director & Senior Curator of the Ben Uri Gallery.

"We are delighted to announce the appointment of Richard Aronowitz-Mercer, currently Head of Research for Impressionist & Modern art, Sotheby’s Europe, as Director & Senior Curator of the Ben Uri Gallery, the London Jewish Museum of Art. He will take up his new role in February 2003.

Richard’s appointment is to lead a new curatorial team - including the appointment of Alma Luxembourg - to further the museum's resurgence and transform its strategic plan of a new 15,000-square-foot international museum space in the heart of London into a reality.

In so doing, the Ben Uri will assert its position at the very centre of Europe for the scholarly study and public appreciation of British and European modern and contemporary Jewish artists. Central to Richard's aims for the future success and expansion of the Ben Uri Gallery is an ambitious education and outreach programme, welcoming a wide cross-section of communities into the Museum and expanding its audience to reflect the rich cultural diversity of London.

Richard's career and accomplishments in the London art world make him particularly able to maintain and develop the Ben Uri Gallery's collection of almost 1,000 works by European and British Jewish artists, the largest collection of its kind in the world. Richard comes to us after more than five years at Sotheby's in London, where he was Head of Research, Europe within the fields of Impressionist & Modern and German Expressionist art. Alongside this role, Richard was a Specialist for Sotheby's Tel Aviv paintings sales and strengthened his connection to twentieth-century Israeli artistic practice through this role.

Richard's knowledge of the lives and work of Jewish artists encompasses all of the major figures within his field, from Amedeo Modigliani to Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall to Moise Kisling, Lucien Pissarro to Ludwig Meidner. Richard gave a talk at the Courtauld Institute in July 2002 as part of the Ben Uri Gallery's symposium in conjunction with our Ludwig and Else Meidner exhibition. Richard has in-depth knowledge of the works of such British artists as Auerbach, Kossoff and Freud and wide-ranging interests in art in exile and the fate of artists during the Third Reich.

Richard is an MA graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He is an accomplished poet and novelist and writes regularly on modern and contemporary art including on Expressionist art for The Oxford Companion to Western Art published by the Oxford University Press in 2001 and on modern and contemporary art for the journal Modern Painters, amongst many others.

Richard brings broad-ranging knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artistic practice to the role of Director & Senior Curator and a passion and determination to broadcast the knowledge and importance of British and European Jewish artists to as wide a public as possible. He relishes the opportunity and challenge to lead the Ben Uri Gallery to its next phase of development - a new building and presence in Central London, positioning it as the epicentre in London, of European visual arts by artists of Jewish descent and their contemporaries."

For further information to arrange interviews or for images please contact the Chairman of the Trustees David Glasser on 0208 245 3545 or by email at DavidG@BENURI.ORG.UK