Galerie Selects the 12 Best Works at TEFAF New York
Don’t leave spring 2026 NYC Armory chapter of The European Fine Art Fair without taking a look at these 12 beautiful pieces that we can't stop thinking about
A Park Avenue Armory show always carries the promise that something incredible can happen to the collector. The dramatic space has been bringing out the excitement of the art hunt for over a century. The 2026 New York edition of TEFAF arrives at the Armory on the late spring breeze following a banner year at Maastricht. Look up at the Tiffany clock. It’s time for kismet. In honor of this spring’s TEFAF, here are the 12 select works of art and design that Galerie editors fell in love with.
Piazza d’Italia con piedistallo vuoto (1955) by Giorgio di Chirico | Tornabuoni Art
Paradoxical encounters seem destined for the deserted plazas often depicted by the Italian surrealist. Here, elements that should move—the train, the clock, the fluttering flags atop the station—instead convey a sense of eerie suspension and deepen the uncanny atmosphere. Humanity is conspicuously absent and long shadows stretch across imaginary dreamscapes steeped in absence and illusion.
Hemmerle Munich, Earrings, 2026 | Hemmerle
Focused around two warmly rose-colored tourmalines set in marbled discs of magnesite and hematite whose natural veining evokes a miniature geological landscape, these earrings by Hemmerle frame the main oval drop in burnt copper and white gold. Their shapes softly echo the curves of some modern sculpture, while the overall design explores a refined tension between structure and spontaneity, resulting in earrings that feel at once grounded and quietly luminous.
“Moorish Turtleback” Chandelier (1900) by Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company | Macklowe Gallery
Scale dramatically heightened the production complexity of Tiffany lamps, which Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Tiffany Studios fashioned through richly colored Favrile glass and intricate leaded-glass construction. That makes this monumental six-foot-tall chandelier all the more breathtaking. Green turtleback tiles sit within heavy sculptural leading while pyramidal jewels, amber glass, and cascading bronze ball chains create a luminous, armor-like mosaic that glows with extraordinary depth.
“It’s exactly the kind of piece that could have hung in this very room 130 years ago,” observed Macklowe Gallery President Benjamin Macklowe, adding, “What’s so remarkable about the chandelier is Tiffany’s ability to blend aesthetic influences from different cultures. You can see Byzantine elements and Venetian influences, yet the whole thing still feels distinctly American.”
Red Blue Chair by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld | Friedman Benda
An irrefutable torchbearer of the De Stijl movement, Gerriet Rietveld fashioned objects that vibrate with a sense of discovery. His iconic “Red Blue Chair’ distills seating to four planes suspended within a lattice of black linear members tipped in yellow, red, and blue. The angled seat and back disrupt the strict geometry with surprising fluidity. Rarely seen outside institutional collections, this example dates to the early 1920s—close to the original design.
Lucy Gong, Associate Director at Friedman Benda, offered insight into why Red Blue Chair is so significant: “Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair is a cornerstone of the story of design. Generations of designers have built on Rietveld’s legacy.” It was a natural choice for TEFAF, she says, because, “TEFAF is an environment where the public can see art and design of the highest quality. The most important examples of Rietveld’s chairs are now found in museums. It is an incredible privilege to share such important work with the public in this context.”
Leonora Carrington, El Gato, 1951 | Leon Tovar Gallery
Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s El Gato sits among the spooky cats of world culture, somewhere between Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat and that famously zany behatted Seussian creature, as all look back to Bast. A solitary, translucent three-eyed beast, it regards the viewer with a thousand-mile stare as disengaged background figures address each other with an earnestness that is for them and them alone. Carrington had a special kind of understanding of the nature of modern disconnection personified here.
Untitled (1981) by Sheila Hicks | Demisch Danant
Among today’s most celebrated fiber artists, Sheila Hicks continues to garner acclaim for her painterly approach to textiles and her ability to transform woven materials into compelling worlds unto themselves. Exceptional in both scale and presence, this monumental work practically glows with saturated bands of electric fuchsia, magenta, orchid, and mulberry while flashes of cobalt and emerald glint between the densely woven strands like hidden jewels.
Green Treasure II (2025) by Camilla Moberg | Galerie Maria Wettergren
Handcrafted in blown glass in Nuutajärvi, Finland’s oldest glassmaking village, this luminescent totemic sculpture channels the iridescent surfaces of insects and birds. Detailed glass elements evoke the markings of beetles, dragonflies, and owls through vivid greens and lustrous jewel tones. Enlarged into abstract formations, these delicate patterns spotlight threatened biodiversity with extraordinary visual intensity.
The Ardent Armchair (c. 1915) by Seizō Sugawara | Galerie Marcilhac
Drawing inspiration from traditional Chinese root chairs, this rare armchair by the Japanese expatriate reflects the exquisite craftsmanship that later informed his celebrated collaborations with Eileen Gray. Crafted around 1915, the piece employs the ancient Japanese maki-e lacquer technique with silver powder and retains its original horsehair cushion. Few surviving works capture the spirit of 20th-century Japonisme so vividly.
Dancers with Audience and Orchestra (2025) by David Hockney | Annely Juda Fine Art
David Hockney’s blockbuster retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris seemed to unlock a renewed sense of vitality, which the octogenarian artist translated into this exuberant meditation on movement and performance. A longtime devotee of theater and ballet, Hockney filled the composition with buoyant color and animated figures while nodding to Henri Matisse’s La Danse.
Barbara Hepworth, Idol | Piano Nobile
Dating from 1971, Barbara Hepworth’s Idol is an abstracted figure reminiscent of Cycladic forms, gleaming in a mirrorlike rosy-gold bronze. It repeats a boxwood version that Hepworth completed a decade and a half prior. Idol shows the eternal motifs of the standing figure as a sculpted form, but pared down to their essence.
Kota-Ndassa Reliquary Figure (late 19th century) | Lucas Ratton
Ndassa sculptors typically followed the canonical Kota statuary model, which pairs a face framed by lateral panels with a crescent crown. This striking reliquary figure departs from that convention by eliminating the upper element altogether, an audacious formal gesture that heightens its graphic power. Created to guard ancestral remains within a reliquary basket, the wood-and-metal effigy embodies both protection and reverence.
Cecily Brown, Functor Hideaway | Berggruen Gallery
Cecily Brown specializes in continuing to find new things to do with paint, even after premature generational report cycles prophesying its demise. In Functor Hideway, her concealed hints of figuration become a Rorschach test for the viewer’s personal insecurities around their feelings in the debate between abstract and and representational painting, until the beauty of the color palette’s harmonies and the waves, streaks, and blotches of her brushwork bring on détente.