Oliver Lenaerts
Founding Member, Contour Law
Oliver is a lawyer and founding member of Contour Law, with focus on art law and business law. He is a teaching assistant at the Jan Ronse institute for Corporate and Financial law at the KULeuven and teaches courses on Art Law. Prior to founding Contour Law, he was a M&A and finance lawyer working for an independent Belgian and US law firm and a Belgian financial institution.
Oliver is author and editor of handbook on (art) leasing and published extensively on art law maters in Belgian and International Journals. Forthcoming publications includes a Belgian monograph on art law. He regularly addresses a professional audience on art law matters: a key Note at a seminar on “First aid for gifts of art collections” organised by Art Center Hugo Voeten and Faro, the Flemish organisation for cultural heritage and a lecture on “turning art collections into philanthropic opportunities” a seminar organised by Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Rubenanium and City of Antwerpen on “Importance of private art collections in Belgium and the Netherlands”, are recent exemples.
Oliver has counseled on a wide range of commercial disputes at both domestic and international level and has included art law since 2015. His specific expertise is the intersection between art and finance. Oliver counsels regularly museums on the structuring of art gifts, counsels collectors on authenticity or art sales, counsels finance companies on the structuring of art leasing deals and counsels galleries, artists and art intermediaries on representation and exposition agreements. He was appointed as Art law expert to the original Arbitration and Mediation pools of CAfA in June 2020.
He is member to the Professional Advisors to the international art market (PAIAM). As a matter of philanthropy and personal interest, he sits on the board of directors of a Kunst in Huis VZW, a state-subsidized Belgian not-for-profit offering art renting services.
Oliver’s educational background includes: a master degree in Law from the Catholic University in Leuven (1997) and an LLM on European law from Paris I (Sorbonne) (1998). He is member of the Brussels bar (initially since 1997 until 2006 and registered again in 2018) and he speaks Dutch, French and English.
Jurisdiction: Belgium