TEFAF New York 2026 Opens With Strong Crowds and Optimistic Dealers

By 4 p.m. on Thursday, the aisles at TEFAF New York at the Park Avenue Armory should have started to thin out. Instead, dealers are still talking, collectors are crowding around the windows, and a low rumble has been echoing through the building, barely abating, since VIP Day opened at 11 a.m.

“This is probably the best TEFAF I’ve seen in a long time,” dealer Sean Kelly said after a few laps of the show. “People are really, really enjoying this. It’s like, after years of putting their heads down and trying to survive the depression that the Trump administration has imposed on this country, everyone has decided to start enjoying life again.”

That kind of momentum permeated the entire exhibition. TEFAF, which runs until Tuesday, May 19, has always taken a different route from New York’s other May fairs: the lights are warmer, the champagne is more bubbling, and the pace is slower. And, this year’s edition also comes with a stronger sense of confidence than the market has had in months.

“Collectors are feeling optimistic,” art consultant Ralph DeLuca told us art news. “Confidence in assets such as stocks has declined. Confidence in hard assets such as art, antiques and collectibles has increased.”

That might help explain why TEFAF, now in its tenth year in New York, still feels unique even during the city’s increasingly crowded spring show week. The fair is characterized by its unusual balance between 20th and 21st century art, bringing together antiques, design, modern art and contemporary works under one roof. In practical terms, this means collectors can go from an Egyptian stele to a Calder mobile to a brand new figurative painting in less than two minutes.

People do this all day long.

At Alison Jacques Gallery in London, visitors gathered around a booth that featured two ghostly paintings of Dorothea Tanning and striking large-format photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Gordon Parks. On one wall hangs Mapplethorpe’s distinctive American flag (1977), with his painted wooden panels hanging nearby Stararranged like fragments from a patriotic drama. Gallery general manager Jonathan Maisie describes TEFAF as one of the few fairs where exploration is not only possible, but an integral part of the entire experience.

“It was never a feeding frenzy,” he said. “You can take your time and learn about what’s on offer. And you can be sure you’re not going to see something at this show that you’d see anywhere else.”

A few aisles away, Sean Kelly Gallery assembled one of the fair’s strongest booths, weaving together historical and contemporary works. Interweaving figures and curly shapes in Shahzia Sikander’s mosaics Hourglass Glitter with Sam Moyer’s stone paintings that push slabs of marble and granite into arrangements that resemble pressed plants or geological specimens.

Kelly himself sounded almost relieved by the atmosphere. “I think everyone has been so frustrated with the state of this country for a long time,” he said. “I think everyone basically decided, fuck it. We have to really live our lives and enjoy ourselves again. They came out and when they saw the quality, they reveled in it.”

The newly launched secondary market-focused Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries made its TEFAF debut with a series of heavyweight works: Eugène Delacroix’s 1841 study for The Smoky Lion, Willem de Kooning’s 1976 a loose, bright work painted in East Hampton in 1946, and a fine Calder mobile that has remained in the same family collection since it was a gift from the artist in 1946.

“It was crazy,” co-founder Emmanuel Di Donna said of the crowd, noting that the booth was only quiet for a few moments in the early afternoon. More interestingly, he pointed to the broader sentiment surrounding the market. “Emotion is what drives everything,” he said, adding that strong performances at next week’s New York auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Philips provided a welcome boost of confidence to collectors and dealers.

Elsewhere, TEFAF’s interest in historical scope is on full display. London antiques dealer David Aaron has sold a 3,300-year-old Egyptian limestone stele depicting Pharaoh Thutmose IV making a sacrifice to the god Atum. The object carries an incredible provenance story that only the art market can produce: it once belonged to bodybuilding entrepreneur Ben Weider, who received it in Cairo in 1964 from the United Arab Republic Bodybuilding Federation.

Meanwhile, Jarrez Art Gallery staged a quieter but elegant dialogue between Robert Motherwell and David Smith alongside works by Helen Frankenthaler and Anthony Caro, echoing the gallery’s contemporaneous exhibition in New York about the friendship and artistic dialogue between the two artists.

One of the most visually dynamic stands is Thaddaeus Ropac, which is dedicated to new paintings by Danish artist Eva Helene Pade. Her monumental canvases, almost theatrically mounted on floor-to-ceiling columns, depict crowds of people dissolving in smoke, shadow, and flesh-toned blurs. exist Jatt (Hunting)nude figures and hounds emerge from rifle smoke, while Opstand (surge) Turn the crowded corpse into a place somewhere between a nightclub and a political uprising. The paintings are filled with a strange mixture of beauty and horror, like historical paintings seen through fogged glass at 3am

Another highlight was the presentation at Salon 94, which was arranged less like a traditional art fair booth and more like a collector’s apartment designed by a slightly crazy perfectionist. A large John Kacere painting of silk lingerie and naked flesh, Marianne R. (1973), hangs above the fireplace and leans against a dark wood panel wall, echoing the way the artist Fernando Botero once displayed the work on his bed in Paris. Around it, rough-edged furniture and lighting by Tom Sachs give the stand the feel of a functional studio crossed with a bachelor pad, while ceramic vessels by Shoko Suzuki soften the entire display with earthy, handcrafted forms. Nearby hang Ed Clark’s “New Orleans Series” and “Egypt Series” paintings, in which giant broomsticks of paint transform abstraction into something almost architectural. For a fair stand, it’s sexy, strange, unusually cohesive, and presented in a way that makes visitors slow down and pause for a moment.

The tension between history and the present may ultimately be why TEFAF continues to be relevant in New York. The fair is packed this week with contemporary fairs geared toward speed and spectacle, but against the backdrop of the historic Park Avenue Armory, the fair still offers something slow and unfamiliar: Here, in one aisle, a collector can admire a pharaonic stele, a vintage Mapplethorpe photograph, and a painting of a riot scene fresh from his studio, then stand and discuss all three over a sip of champagne.