Suites Over Booths: London Invitational Opens at $32,000-a-Night Hotel

By Grace Kim

The London Invitational opened its inaugural edition with 13 galleries occupying suites at The Chancery Rosewood in Mayfair, a hotel where rooms run from £1,200 to £24,000 ($1,600 to $32,000) per night. The fair, an extension of the Dallas Invitational, runs through Sunday during Frieze Week.

The model swaps the convention-hall booth for the hotel suite, and its founder says that's deliberate. James Cope, the British-born, Dallas-based dealer behind the fair, told ARTnews the format slows the art fair experience down at a moment when the market is "slow and steady" after the post-Covid splurge.

"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," Cope said.

The precedent is real, if dated: New York's Armory Show began in 1994 in the small rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel. Cope is consciously reaching back to that era. "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," he said.

Who is showing, and at what prices?

Participating galleries include Andrew Reed Gallery, Broadway, Charles Asprey, Europa, François Ghebaly, James Cope Gallery, James Kelly Contemporary, Lomex, Marinaro, Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Vardaxoglou. The scale is intimate, but the sums aren't small:

• Bel Ami (Los Angeles) offers works by Minami Kobayashi, Guillaume Dénervaud, Soshiro Matsubara, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Dan Mitchell, Ian Miyamura, Lauren Satlowski and Marina Stern, priced $5,000 to $33,000.
• Franklin Parrasch Gallery's works start at £2,800 ($3,700) and reach the high five figures, spanning Peter Alexander's block wedges, Soyoung Lee's distorted portraits, Sylvia Snowden's abstract figures and Joe Goode's blue skies.
• Dealer Charles Asprey shows Alessandro Raho's paintings at £6,000 to £35,000 ($8,000 to $46,800). Raho's best-known work is a portrait of actor Judi Dench at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
• Marinaro Gallery (New York) made a conscious decision to feature only works under $10,000, by 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," dealer Lauren Marinaro 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."

What does this change for collectors?

Mainly access and pace. Cope's own collector base runs from buyers in their late 20s and 30s to established collectors in their 50s, 60s and 70s working in shipping, oil, gas and banking. His suite displayed works by young artists Michelle Rawlings and Coco Young. Bel Ami director Lee Foley told ARTnews she has found avid interest from new collectors aged 20 to 40 who 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.

Franklin Parrasch joined because he wants new ways to "shape the model," and he sees the current trend toward pairing experiences with art as a response to a "struggling market." He also noted that thinner revenues can push artists somewhere useful. "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, adding that collectors are now less impulsive.

The fair also gave two dealers without physical galleries a place to exhibit. Asprey, a trustee at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, represents Raho without a space. "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," he said.

Is London beating Paris?

The London-versus-Paris debate stayed alive at both Frieze London and the Invitational. New York gallery Broadway did both fairs, returning to Frieze for the first time in two years. "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," cofounder Joe Cole told ARTnews, noting the gallery's strongest curatorial attendance came on Frieze's 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."

As for taking the Invitational to Paris next? Cope's answer was blunt: "I don't really like Paris." He praised London's metropolitan mix of visitors from Asia, the Middle East and Russia, and said he isn't chasing Paris's hype. With Dallas galleries returning edition after edition—proof, he says, that "business is being done"—the suite model now has a second city to test whether slow selling scales.