{"id":1937684,"date":"2026-05-15T20:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T17:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1937684"},"modified":"2026-05-15T20:13:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T17:13:09","slug":"tefaf-new-york-2026-opens-with-strong-crowds-and-optimistic-dealers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1937684","title":{"rendered":"TEFAF New York 2026 Opens With Strong Crowds and Optimistic Dealers"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_5508.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tBy 4 p.m. on Thursday, the aisles of TEFAF New York at the Park Avenue Armory should have started thinning out. Instead, dealers were still pinned into conversations, collectors crowded around vitrines, and the low roar that had echoed though the building since the doors opened for its VIP day at 11 a.m. had barely let up.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is probably the best TEFAF I\u2019ve seen for a long time,\u201d dealer Sean Kelly said after making several laps around the fair. \u201cPeople are really, really enjoying this thing. It\u2019s as if, after years of keeping our heads down and trying to get through the depression the Trump administration has forced of the country, everyone\u2019s decided start enjoying themselves again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat sense of momentum hovered over the entire fair. TEFAF, which runs through Tuesday, May 19, has always occupied a different lane from the rest of New York\u2019s May fairs: the lighting is warmer, the champagne more effervescent, the pace slower. And, this year\u2019s edition also arrived with a sharper sense of confidence than the market has seen in months.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cCollectors feel bullish,\u201d art adviser Ralph DeLuca told ARTnews<\/em>. \u201cThere\u2019s less confidence in assets like stocks and things. There\u2019s more confidence in hard assets like art, antiques, and collectibles.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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GordonParks\u2019s Department Store, Mobile, Alabama<\/em> (1956) features in Alison Jacques\u2019s booth at TEFAF New York.<\/span>\u00a9The Gordon Parks Foundation<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThat may help explain why TEFAF, now a decade into its New York run, continues to feel distinct even amid the city\u2019s increasingly crowded spring fair week. The fair\u2019s identity rests on its unusual balance between art from the 20th and 21st centuries, mixing antiquities, design, modern art, and contemporary work under the same roof. In practice, that means a collector can walk from an Egyptian stele to a Calder mobile to a brand-new figurative painting in less than two minutes.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd people were doing exactly that all day.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt London-based Alison Jacques, visitors clustered around a booth that paired two ghostly Dorothea Tanning paintings with striking large-format photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Gordon Parks. On one wall hangs Mapplethorpe\u2019s stark\u00a0American Flag<\/em> (1977), while nearby hangs his painted wooden\u00a0Stars<\/em>, arranged like fragments of patriotic theater. Jonathan Maisie, the gallery\u2019s managing director, described TEFAF as one of the few fairs where discovery not only feels possible, but is part and parcel with the whole experience.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s never a feeding frenzy,\u201d he said. \u201cYou allowed take time, learn about what\u2019s on offer. And you can be sure at this fair you\u2019re not going see the things you see everywhere else.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Shahzia Sikander\u2019s The Hour Glass<\/em> (2025) is displayed at Sean Kelly Gallery\u2019s booth. <\/span>Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tA few aisles away, Sean Kelly Gallery had assembled one of the fair\u2019s stronger booths, weaving together historical and contemporary work. The intertwined figures and curling forms in Shahzia Sikander\u2019s mosaic\u00a0The Hour Glass<\/em>\u00a0shimmered alongside Sam Moyer\u2019s stone paintings that push slabs of marble and granite into arrangements resembling pressed plants or geological samples.<\/p>\n

\n\tKelly himself sounded almost relieved by the atmosphere. \u201cI think everybody\u2019s been so depressed by the state of the country for so long,\u201d he said. \u201cI think everybody\u2019s just basically decided, fuck it. We\u2019ve got to actually live our lives and enjoy ourselves again. And they\u2019re coming out and when they\u2019re seeing quality, they\u2019re reveling in it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe newly launched, secondary-market-focused Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries made its TEFAF debut with a bevy of heavyweight material: a smoky Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix lion study from 1841, a loose and luminous Willem de Kooning painted in East Hampton in 1976, and a delicate Calder mobile that had remained in the same family collection since the artist gifted it in 1946.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s been insane,\u201d cofounder Emmanuel Di Donna said of the crowds, noting that the booth was only quiet for a few brief moments in the early afternoon. More interestingly, he pointed to the broader mood surrounding the market. \u201cSentiment is what drives everything,\u201d he said, adding that a strong showing at next week\u2019s New York auctions, at Christie\u2019s, Sotheby\u2019s, and Philips, was giving collectors and dealers alike a welcome boost of confidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Installation view of Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries presentation, TEFAF New\u00a0York.<\/span>Photo Pauline Shapiro<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tElsewhere, TEFAF\u2019s appetite for historical range was on full display. London antiquities dealer David Aaron sold a 3,300-year-old Egyptian limestone stele depicting Pharaoh Thutmose IV presenting offerings to the god Atum. The object came with one of those improbable provenance stories only the art market can produce: it had once belonged to bodybuilding entrepreneur Ben Weider, who received it in Cairo in 1964 from the United Arab Republic of Bodybuilding Federation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, Yares Art staged a quieter but elegant conversation between Robert Motherwell and David Smith alongside works by Helen Frankenthaler and Anthony Caro, echoing the gallery\u2019s concurrent New York exhibition about the friendship and artistic dialogue between the two artists.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the more visually dynamic booths belonged to Thaddaeus Ropac, which dedicated its stand to new paintings by the Danish artist Eva Helene Pade. Her huge canvases, installed almost theatrically on floor-to-ceiling posts, depict crowds dissolving into smoke, shadow, and flesh-toned blurs. In\u00a0Jagt (Hunt)<\/em>, naked figures and hounds emerge through clouds of rifle smoke, while\u00a0Opstand (Surge)<\/em>\u00a0turns a tightly packed mass of bodies into something between a nightclub and a political uprising. The paintings carry a strange mix of beauty and dread, like history paintings viewed through fogged glass at 3 a.m.<\/p>\n

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Installation view of Salon 94\u2018s booth at TEFAF New York.<\/span>Photo Elisabeth Bernstein<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAnother highlight is Salon 94\u2019s presentation, which was staged less like a conventional art fair booth and more like a collector\u2019s apartment designed by a slightly deranged perfectionist. A huge John Kacere painting of silk underwear and bare flesh,\u00a0Marianne R.<\/em> (1973), hangs above a fireplace against dark wood-paneled walls, echoing the way artist Fernando Botero once displayed the work over his bed in Paris. Around it, Tom Sachs\u2019s rough-edged furniture and lamps gave the booth the feeling of a functioning workshop crossed with a bachelor pad, while ceramic vessels by Shoko Suzuki soften the whole presentation with earthy, hand-built forms. Nearby hang Ed Clark paintings from his\u00a0\u201cNew Orleans Series\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cEgyptian Series,\u201d where giant broom-driven sweeps of paint turned abstraction into something almost architectural. It was sexy, strange, and unusually cohesive for a fair booth, and the kind of presentation that made visitors slow down and stay a while.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat tension between the historical and the contemporary may ultimately be what continues to make TEFAF work in New York. In a week crowded with contemporary fairs optimized for speed and spectacle, the fair, amplified by its setting at the historic Park Avenue Armory, still offers something slower and stranger: a place where collectors can look at a stele of a pharaoh, a vintage Mapplethorpe photograph, and a fresh-from-the-studio painting of a riot scene in the span of one aisle, then stand there talking about all three over champagne for 20 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_5508.jpg?w=1024″] By 4 p.m. on Thursday, the aisles of TEFAF New York at the Park Avenue Armory should have started thinning out. Instead, dealers were still pinned into conversations, collectors crowded around vitrines, and the low roar that had echoed though the building since the doors opened for its VIP day at 11 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1937684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1937684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1937684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1937684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1937684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}