London Invitational Targets the City’s Diverse Collectors Amid ‘Bullish’ and ‘Struggling’ Market

When Sotheby’s reported first-half consolidated sales of $4.4 billion in July, some suggested that the business was now stretching beyond the auction room and into hospitality and real estate. If this Frieze Week is anything to go by, it seems smaller art fairs like Minor Attractions and London Invitational (an extension of the Dallas Invitational) have also taken note.

Minor Attractions changed locations for its fourth edition and picked The Newman as its new home, a recently opened hotel in central London. And for the London Invitational’s inaugural fair, running through Sunday, 13 suites at The Chancery Rosewood in Mayfair have been taken over by galleries including Andrew Reed Gallery, Broadway, Charles Asprey, Europa, François Ghebaly, James Cope Gallery, James Kelly Contemporary, Lomex, Marinaro, Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Vardaxoglou. The all-suite property ranges from £1,200 to £24,000 ($1,600 to $32,000) per night and opened its doors back in September.

James Cope, the British-born, Dallas-based art dealer and founder of the fair, told ARTnews this model is slowing down the art fair experience. It’s what’s needed, he said, when the market is “slow and steady” after the sudden splurge post-Covid.

“I hate hearing about the doom and gloom of the art market—it’s not in a bad place. We’re just coming out of a real bullish market and everyone’s recalibrating,” he added.

Cope, who participated in Frieze London with his namesake gallery, is intentionally alluding to a bygone era of art fairs with his participation in the Dallas and London Invitationals. (New York’s Armory Show began in 1994 in the small rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York.) “This environment creates a more human time with dealers, collectors, curators and being in a domestic setting helps you understand how the artwork might look in your home,” Cope said.

He said his measure of success extends beyond the transactions taking place—even though the participating galleries in the Dallas Invitational have continuously returned, which shows “business is being done.”

“Are people happy and smiling? I’m a gallery owner, and I want to obviously make sales and enjoy my time,” Cope said.

In his suite, he had the works of young artists Michelle Rawlings and Coco Young on display, fitting right into the plush wooden interiors of the hotel. Cope’s collector demographic runs from mid- to late 20s and 30s to established collectors in their 50s, 60s and 70s who work in industries such as shipping, oil, gas and banking.

The London Invitational may be intimate, but the sums associated with its offerings are big.

The Los Angeles–based gallery Bel Ami offered pieces from several of its artists: Minami Kobayashi, Guillaume Dénervaud, Soshiro Matsubara, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Dan Mitchell, Ian Miyamura, Lauren Satlowski, and Marina Stern, ranging from $5,000 to $33,000. Matsubara’s work is currently on display at the Gagosian London as part of the René Magritte exhibition “This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte,” which has been the gallery’s most visited show to date in London.

Bel Ami director Lee Foley told ARTnews that she has found avid interest in her artists from new collectors ages between 20 and 40 that work in film and tech. “There is something special about the art scene being a close-knit community in a time when that’s harder and harder to find. It’s our job to teach new collectors about the artists as we rely on them for business,” Foley said.

At Franklin Parrasch Gallery, the works start from £2,800 ($3,700) and go into the high five figures; they range from Peter Alexander’s block wedges to Soyoung Lee’s distorted portraits to Sylvia Snowden’s abstract figures to Joe Goode’s blue skies. Franklin Parrasch, the gallery’s namesake founder, told ARTnews that he joined the London Invitational because he’s interested in new ways to “shape the model,” and the current trend is to include experiences with understanding art to counteract a “struggling market.”

“At the same time, I think artists are finding ways to survive and thrive in their own environments. Sometimes not having the copious amounts of money they were making a few years back is good for generating new energy and thought in other areas besides commerce,” Parrasch said, noting that collectors are less impulsive in their purchases.

Responding to the tough market, New York dealer Lauren Marinaro of Marinaro Gallery took a conscious decision to feature artworks under $10,000 from artists Ever Baldwin, Ridley Howard, Ron Isaacs, Ryan Johnson and Alessandro Teoldi.

“It’s an approachable number right now and a way for introducing my program to London,” she told ARTnews. “It’s definitely been a hard three to four years, but there’s been a light at the end of the tunnel in the past six months. Art advisers are doing really good work in educating people that’s resulted in new collectors coming in and meeting a lot of young people.”

The London Invitational also gave two dealers without galleries the opportunity to exhibit their artists.

Dealer Charles Asprey displayed Alessandro Raho’s small to large paintings ranging from £6,000 to £35,000 ($8,000 to $46,8000) depicting scenes from Los Angeles to the flowers found in his London home. The artist’s most famous work is a portrait of actor Judi Dench at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

“My artist doesn’t like exhibiting on white walls and the art world has changed, you don’t necessarily need physical spaces anymore to represent someone,” said Asprey, who is also a trustee at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

At Frieze London and the London Invitational, the London-versus-Paris debate remained a topic of conversation. The New York–based gallery Broadway tested out the waters by doing both fairs; the gallery participated in Frieze London two years ago.

“We felt that the combination of these fairs despite what’s been going on with the popularity of Art Basel Paris is that London is getting its footing back,” Joe Cole, cofounder of Broadway, told ARTnews, adding that the gallery had its strongest curatorial attendance at Frieze London on the VIP day. “I certainly met a number of new collectors from the UK, Europe, and the Middle East that I don’t think I would have met in the US.”

Now that London Invitational has extended to the UK, is Paris next on the cards? “I don’t really like Paris,” Cope said, praising London for its metropolitan nature. “There’s people from Asia and the Middle East and Russia and everywhere in London. There’s so much hype around Paris and I’m not trying to compete with that.”