Critically-Acclaimed New Symposium Supports Spectacular Exhibitions at London Art Week Winter 2019
Universal acclaim was expressed for the Symposium, a new initiative launched this year by London Art Week for the Winter 2019 event held from 1-6 December. It underpinned a week of some spectacular and specialist exhibitions, combined with displays of important or recently-discovered works at more than 30 leading galleries and auction houses throughout St. James’s and Mayfair.
The Symposium, which was held at the National Gallery on Monday 2 December, brought an added dimension to the London Art Week Winter proceedings, and praise to the organisers and panellists for an enlightening afternoon of discussion around the theme Conversations on Collecting. The event was enormously popular, and welcomed several hundred attendees including members of the art trade, international museum curators and collectors.
Amelia Higgins, Director of London Art Week, said“We are delighted at how well this Winter’s London Art Week has gone, with so many notable exhibitions and some interesting sales. The hugely positive reaction to the new addition of the LAW Symposium is very exciting and it brings a new important focus to our Winter Week. The Winter Week was added three years ago to complement our well-established Summer series of exhibitions, and gives participants a double benefit from the publicity and marketing of their gallery at the typically quieter end of the year. Our events programme goes from strength to strength, with all our Winter talks oversubscribed this year, from Jewellery in Costume in the Time of Charles I with Fashion Historian Aileen Ribeiro and the Society of Jewellery Historians at the Weiss Gallery, to Dulwich Picture Gallery Director Jennifer Scott’s fabulous talk on Rembrandt’s Light at Colnaghi. I am greatly looking forward to London Art Week 2020.”
Stephen Ongpin, Chairman of London Art Week, continued:
“The Symposium is a pro-active means by which LAW can offer an important educational contribution, adding value to the art scene not just in London but for the UK as a whole. International curators and collectors came here to take part, giving the public an opportunity to get ‘behind the scenes’ of major museum exhibitions, and be inspired by individual members of the art community. Combined with the dealers’ commercial selling exhibitions and the more intimate in-gallery talks that are regularly offered, the addition of the Symposium shows that London Art Week Winter has very much matured.”
