VIP Art Fair launches its inaugural edition on Saturday featuring 138 leading contemporary art galleries from 30 countries, with more than 2,000 artists and 7,500 works of art in inventory. Works on view at the Fair range from more than 50 pieces priced above $1 million USD to more than 100 artworks valued at less than $5,000 USD. To date, visitors from 126 countries around the globe have signed up to participate including Russia, China, Ghana, Afghanistan, Uruguay, New Zealand, and Lebanon. The Fair runs live, exclusively online at www.vipartfair.com for one-week only, from January 22 to January 30, 2011.

Co-founded by New York-based dealers James and Jane Cohan and Internet entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren, VIP Art Fair re-configures the traditional art fair model for the Internet. Similar to traditional art fairs, VIP Art Fair is a platform for the leading contemporary art galleries to offer works by critically acclaimed artists to their existing clients, as well as to new audiences worldwide. All acquisitions are arranged directly between the dealer and the collector.

Browsing the Fair is free. All visitors can experience the thrill of discovery as they travel between galleries from diverse locations such as Sydney, Shanghai, Cape Town, Athens, London, Reykjavik, New York and Sao Paulo. Visitors can click from work to work in each gallery’s virtual booth to access artworks by such established artists as Richard Prince, Francis Bacon, Urs Fischer, Sarah Lucas, Lucien Freud, Damien Hirst, Subodh Gupta, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Beatriz Milhazes, and by the most exciting emerging artists working today.

VIP Art Fair is uniquely versatile in its presentation of more than 90 monumental scale installations, 75 video/multi-media works, 360 photographs, 500 paintings, 400 sculptures and 100 drawings and works in other media. Access to in-depth information, presented in a variety of languages, combined with enriched viewing provides a substantive and rewarding experience for art collectors and enthusiasts alike. Visitors can search for an artist by name and follow a trail of the artist’s work through the Fair. They can also create tours of their favorite works that can easily be shared via email and social media.

As with the traditional fairs, VIP Art Fair is providing VIP Passes to more than fifty international museums for distribution to their curators and high-level patrons. Notable participating institutions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Whitechapel Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Serpentine Gallery, Kröller-Müller Museum, Mori Art Museum, Tate (American Patrons Group) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The Fair opens on Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 8:00 a.m. EST and concludes on Sunday, January 30, 2011, at 7:59 a.m. EST.