LONDON.- London Art Week is an exciting joint venture that unites Master Paintings Week and Master Drawings and Sculpture Week (formerly Master Drawings London). The new collaboration will provide a coherent platform, sharing advertising and creating a new online portal through which the individual websites can be accessed. London Art Week will also produce a map with the locations of all the participants making it easier for collectors to navigate the week. More than 50 specialist dealers across the fine art disciplines and the major London auction houses will take part in this new initiative.

Founding member of Master Drawings London, Lowell Libson, comments, “London Art Week gives buyers at every level an opportunity not only to see the finest works available, but also to engage with dealers of unparalleled expertise and experience. I believe that this degree of cooperation between dealers in different disciplines, as well as the auction houses, would be unachievable in any other major ‘Art City’.”

The strength of the format of London Art Week lies in its simplicity. By joining together to hold a series of coordinated exhibitions in galleries throughout the West End at the same time that the auction houses hold their major sales, specialist dealers in these disciplines are giving collectors, both private and institutional, the opportunity to view the full range of works available on the market. During the first weekend, all the participants’ doors will be open giving visitors the opportunity to look at works of art at their leisure.

“We welcome this initiative which strongly underlines the unique and unrivalled connoisseurship and expertise to be found in the art trade in London,” comments Johnny Van Haeften, co-founder of Master Paintings Week. “The old cliché of the fusty gallery is totally out of date and we want people to discover just how accessible we are and what treasures we hold.” Alex Toscano of Trinity Fine Art, representing the sculpture dealers, added “the inclusion of sculpture galleries in London Art Week is both exciting and logical”.

London Art Week will serve to promote specialist dealers and their works in all three disciplines, while encouraging collectors and enthusiasts to visit exhibitions in the galleries. By displaying the objects in intimate gallery settings located in Mayfair and St James’s, the event will encourage the building of relationships between clients and dealers.