Art Photos mixed

Small established gallery in the Upper East Side is seeking a Gallery Assistant.
The position will include the following responsibilities:
Ensure that the gallery is open and ready for presentation
Answer phones and manage mail
Maintain a current website (wordpress) , phone message greeting, contact database
Send out e-mail blasts for exhibition announcements (mailchimp)
Compose, proofread, organize, and maintain correspondence, including sale proposals and offers, consignments, loan forms, shipping
Managing gallery inventory
Photography of incoming and outgoing artworks
Prior experience is necessary
The ideal candidate will be a creative thinker with the ability to prioritize and problem-solve
Attentive to detail within a small work environment.
Strong knowledge of Art History is a must.
Proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite (Word and Excel) required, familiarity with Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign preferred.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Extremely self-motivated and responsible
This is a part-time position, Tuesday thru Friday beginning after Labor day – Paid training thru summer 1-2 days a week
Candidates need to have a US work permit

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The Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed’s latest work—a sculpted carrier pigeon bearing a Blackberry and set of explosives —is unveiled this week on the top floor of the multi-storey car park in central Peckham, south London.The permanent piece, commissioned by the non-profit organisation Bold Tendencies, is entitled Bristow after the long-running cartoon in the London newspaper the Evening Standard, which depicted the everyday activities of a humdrum, maverick buying clerk who works in the Chester-Perry building.

“For me the artistic act is like the old mole that sticks its nose out where nobody is expecting,” Abdessemed says. Hannah Barry, the co-founder of Bold Tendencies, calls the unassuming work an “anti-monument”.

Abdessemed’s piece made of stacked machetes, Nymphéas (2015), was shown at last year’s Venice Biennale in the Arsenale exhibition, All the World’s Futures. The catalogue entry described the artist's vision as uncompromising, adding that "Abdessemed's work always appears to be in a state of high alert." The artist once told The Art Newspaper that "politics can be as vicious as a chimpanzee”.

A new book about Abdessemed’s practice is due to be published in September by Bold Tendencies with contributions from Kieran Long, the senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and professor Sarah Wilson of the Courtauld Institute of Art.

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The British Museum in London was forced to temporarily close earlier today (19 May) when Greenpeace activists protested at BP’s sponsorship of the exhibition Sunken Cities, Egypt’s Lost Worlds (until 27 November).The demonstrators climbed the museum’s front columns, unfurling 27-foot long banners emblazoned with the words Sinking Cities. The museum was subsequently closed from 10am to 2pm to ensure visitors’ safety, a spokeswoman says. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said 11 people had been arrested for aggravated trespass.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Elena Polisano says in a statement: “We rebranded the exhibition and dressed the pillars at the entrance with five places that evoke flooding, extreme weather and rising sea levels in the 21st century.” These included New Orleans and Hebden Bridge, a town in West Yorkshire, UK, which was hit by severe floods last winter.
Polisano adds that the environmental group took a stand “because of the irony of an oil company sponsoring an exhibition whose name practically spells out impacts of climate change”.

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A 30-piece retrospective dedicated to Glenn Brown, which opened earlier this week at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, southern France (14 May-11 September), examines how the leading UK artist draws upon the themes and techniques used by Vincent van Gogh. We asked Bice Curiger, the exhibition curator and artistic director of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, about the significance of the comparative analysis.The parallel show, Van Gogh in Provence: Modernising Tradition (until 11 September), includes 31 paintings from the collections of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.

The Art Newspaper: Why is the exhibition important?

Bice Curiger: It is the first time that Glenn is showing paintings, sculptures and drawings together in a show. He had stopped painting for almost three years to concentrate on drawing and it is so incredibly impressive to see now the richness, coherence and uniqueness of his artistic research and vision. As this exhibition is inevitably connected to Van Gogh, one witnesses an unusual juxtaposition between this master of classic Modern art [Van Gogh] and an eccentric contemporary artist. It is a very productive dynamic emanating between two obsessively lucid artistic worlds, which seem at once contrasting and tangential.

Have you discovered anything new about the work of Glenn Brown?

Oh, yes, on many levels; there is for instance the connection to popular culture, which in Glenn’s work is openly referred to in the titles; for instance Suffer Well after a song by Depeche Mode, which is the title of the show, and the title of a painting from 2007. It is interesting to see how he refers in his paintings to reproductions, as much as he draws upon original works of art studied in museums; this is something he shares with Van Gogh who was a collector of all sorts of reproductions, from Rembrandt to Millet and magazine illustrators.
Another aspect I think is interesting to discover in the context of this exhibition is a specific emotional or expressive side in the imagery of this liquified world, where wonders and horror are so closely entangled.


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One Sunny Day
Photo by Tony Lee

To its architects, Herzog & de Meuron, the concrete oil tanks beneath the Tate Modern extension are more than its physical foundations, they have been “the starting point for intellectual and curatorial approaches” to the entire £260m scheme.The lure of ‘as found’ spaces was never more obvious than when the Tate carved the Turbine Hall out of the Bankside Power Station back in 2000. On their return, Herzog & de Meuron has again used the ‘as found’ to inspire, taking the trefoil arrangement of three subterranean former oil storage chambers—The Tanks—and extruding it upwards, twisting the geometries through the Switch House’s 64.5 metre height until it reaches the 10th floor viewing platform.

The Tanks themselves are set aside for performance—although on opening they will also be occupied by 1960s sculptures that have broken free of their guard ropes Robert Morris’s Untitled (1965), Charlotte Posenenske’s Prototype for Revolving Vane (1967–68) and Rasheed Araeen’s Zero to Infinity (1968).

From here rises a concrete spiral staircase of Hollywood-via-industry glamour to the ground floor. Above is a stacked trio of flexible gallery spaces, events and members rooms that inhabit the brick-clad concrete ziggurat and which are joined by a sequence of elegant stairs occupying various corners of the building. Light is filtered into the circulation spaces through the perforated brick skin while that to the galleries proper is carefully controlled—daylight is anathema to the multi-media shows planned.



Switch House, Tate Modern © Iwan Baan

The 1960s pieces in The Tanks signal the thrust of this new hang that Tate Modern’s new director Frances Morris says emphasize art’s more direct engagement with the viewer since that decade. (And direct engagement seems to be the trajectory of London’s major collections with the Victoria and Albert Museum’s design director David Bickle revealing plans earlier this month to infest V&A East with audiences from front-of-house to conservation labs).With the Switch House, Tate Modern not only has 40 percent more space for galleries and the public but is a literal tour de force with the covering lattice forming a structurally advanced net of 336,000 bricks.


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A breathtaking sunset over Moreton Bay in Sandgate, Queensland | Photo by Keiran Lusk

Walk through the forest
Photo by Shooting Mad

The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (ICA; until 29 May) is hosting the second Artists’ Film Biennial, with programmes overseen by artists and curators, workshops for emerging film-makers and a special group-screening featuring films made in the past two years.“The ICA becomes a base for the UK’s moving-image organisations to come together, share in presentations and confer on their approaches and system of support for artist film-makers,” says Steven Cairns, the ICA associate curator of artists’ film and moving image. The event follows on from the ICA’s Artists’ Film Club, a monthly programme of artists’ films.

Artists Ahmet Ögüt, Charlotte Prodger, Martine Syms and Ming Wong have compiled their own screening schedules: Ögüt has selected works such as The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) by John Smith and Cristina Lucas’s Touch and Go (2010). The Berlin-based curator, Saim Demircan, and Hanne Mugaas, the director of the Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway, have also organised film programmes.

An open call for works by international emerging film-makers drew more than 300 submissions. Eight entries were subsequently selected for the group screening, entitled Outside, from participants such as Amir Ghazi-Noory and Patrick Rowan. “The quality of the works submitted was extremely high. The resulting programme is a tight, fast-paced, tour de force of some of the best work from the next generation of artists’ film-makers,” Cairns says.
A workshop for young film-makers aged 16 to 24 is also scheduled as part of the ICA’s ongoing series Stop Play Record.**


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Red & Blue Sky
Photo by Bertoni Siswanto