After a two-year hiatus, the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, has returned to New York’s Park Avenue Armory. It opens to the public today and runs through May 10.
This is the first in-person TEFAF fair since the March 2020 event in Maastricht, the Netherlands, which was held just before the coronavirus outbreak shuttered most cultural gatherings. More than 91 galleries from 14 countries have shown up in New York, and all intend to impress, too, with blue-chip offerings of modern European and contemporary art. London gallery Dickinson is presenting “Visible and Tangible Form,” an eye-popping exhibition of Bauhaus, Op art, and Concrete art, and Vedovi Gallery from Brussels shows a standout embroidery work crafted by Alighiero Boetti alongside Afghan artisans. But these were just two highlights among many.
Antiquities and Old Master paintings are what TEFAF is best known for, though these have largely taken a backseat. One exception comes at the booth of Paris Galerie Bernard Dulon, which stands out for assembling the fair’s first-ever offering of classical African art. Meanwhile, Roman mosaics and carved marble statues enjoy the flattering low lights of the Armory’s stately second-floor galleries.
Below, a look at the seven best offerings at the fair.
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Marc Chagall at David Tunick
Image Credit: Courtesy David Tunick, Inc. New York dealer David Tunick has prepared a crowd-pleasing display of prints by Edvard Munch, including a version of his Madonna, from 1895, as well as pieces by Picasso and Modigliani. The marquee item, however, is Marc Chagall’s knockout Self-Portrait with Palette. Chagall, a French-Russian painter whose dreamy, enigmatic works hang in the finest museum collections in the world, created some 1,000 paintings, drawings, and watercolors before his death in 1985. There are only eight or nine known self-portraits by Chagall, though. This one depicts his hometown, the Russian city of Vitebsk, and was completed during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Chagall gazes at the town, which is shown unanchored from the earth and drifting to the sky, unmoored by the year’s turmoil.
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Teresita Fernández at Lehmann Maupin
Image Credit: Photo by Daniel Kukla Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London Lehmann Maupin dedicated its booth to a striking site-specific presentation by Teresita Fernández. The artist, who was born in Miami after her parents emigrated from Havana, often draws on organic material in installations that focus on the political and natural landscape of Cuba. The TEFAF booth gathers four interconnected bodies of work that range from an immense charred feather to small protruding black panels that are lined and splattered with fuchsia. The limited palette combined with the materials—wood, lump charcoal, and paper—evoke the sense of standing in forest at night after a great fire has died, or in an expanse of space illuminated by flickers of far-off galaxies.
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Thornton Dial at Blum & Poe
Image Credit: Photo: Tessa Solomon/ARTnews Where some exhibitors brought slick paintings or polished sculptures, Blum & Poe created a can’t-miss display of dense, expressionistic paintings of the self-taught artist Thornton Dial, whose estate the Los Angeles–based gallery now represents. Dial, who was born in 1928 on a former cotton plantation to a family of sharecroppers, poured the nuances of his biography into complex paintings and raw assemblages comprised of industrial bits and found objects like fabric, wire, doll parts. The grand Imagination, from 1989, is one of the best works at the booth, exemplifying his practice of hiding allusions to oppressive Jim Crow laws in animal imagery. Color radiates amid roiling energies as the subject and bird tussle for control.
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Yares Art
Image Credit: Photo: Tessa Solomon/ARTnews Titled “Fields of Color,” this mini-exhibition showcases a 1960s and ’70s vein of abstract painting that prioritized flat, brilliant expanses of pure color. Titans of the form, including Milton Avery, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, are represented here. The centerpiece is a commanding, wall-to-wall “Veil” painting by Morris Louis. Lines of color pour from either top edge of the canvas to the bottom corners, like a rainbow gone astray. Take a few steps out of the booth to best appreciate it.
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W & K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher
Image Credit: Courtesy W&K-Wienerroither & Kohlbacher W & K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, which is based in Vienna and New York, is showing some 30 works reflecting its specialty in German and Austrian Expressionism. Most are modestly scaled works on paper by artists including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, and Egon Shiele that are a pleasure to slowly take in. Two of the best works are Klimt’s 1914–15 Two Female Nudes Reclining, One Behind the Other and Schiele’s 1915 charcoal drawing Girl Leaning on Her Elbow.
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Donald Ellis Gallery
Image Credit: Photo : Tessa Solomon/ARTnews New York’s Donald Ellis Gallery, which specializes in historical Native American art with an emphasis on Northwest Coast, Inuit, and Plains communities, brought a wide-ranging selection of masks, carvings, and sketches. A series of “ledger drawings” from the late 19th century attributed to the artist Cedar Tree offer insight into Southern Arapaho culture in the Central Plains of the United States during a traumatic era of contact with colonizers. The name comes from the ruled pages torn from account books Native artists acquired from Europeans. Meanwhile, several crayon and graphite drawings were created by a group of Native men between 1875 and 1878 while imprisoned at Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida. Also of note is a woven basket by Louisa Keyser, also known as Dat So La Lee (1850–1925), who was celebrated for her innovation in the technique and form of Washoe basketry. Her style, called “degikup,” reinvented the plainly adorned traditional Washoe baskets as flat-bottomed coiled spheres decorated with flame motifs.
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Urs Fischer and Man Ray at Gagosian
Image Credit: © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2022 Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian TEFAF benefits from its beautiful setting, but it suffers because the booths run small and oddly proportioned, causing bottlenecking and crowding. (On the well-attended VIP preview, several elbows brushed dangerously close to a Picasso bust.) Gagosian was notable for optimizing its asymmetric space near the entrance with a tightly curated presentation of Urs Fischer and Man Ray. On the largest wall is Fischers Grilled (2010), from the “Problem Paintings” series, a monumental black-and-white vintage still of an Old Hollywood film star whose identity is obscured by a warped spoon. Two small photographs situated on either side anchor the image. On the opposite wall is Man Ray’s Les grands-trans-parents, an elliptical polished mirror scrawled with its title. It’s a playful take on fellow Surrealist André Breton’s concept of “Great Transparents”—invisible entities among us motivated by disrupting daily life. Man Ray had a different take: the cause of our misfortune is apparent.