The European Fine Art Fair Is a Cabinet of Curiosities

The European Fine Art Fair’s (TEFAF) reputation for being at the top of the luxury spectrum lent it the air of a frenzied spring shopping spree on Thursday afternoon in New York City. Underneath bobbing strings of purple alliums, VIPs strode through the Park Avenue Armory previewing art, design, jewelry, and antiquities from 91 galleries and dealers, dodging the metal buckets of wandering oyster shuckers as one might a perfume kiosk spritz at a mall.

Since 1988, TEFAF Maastricht has exhibited “7,000 years of art history” in the Netherlands. Organizers brought the fair stateside in 2016, emphasizing modern and contemporary work — though the show is not without its Roman busts — twice a year until 2020, when they pivoted to a single springtime event. That the New York edition is mostly working with the 20th and 21st centuries makes it easier to skirt questions of provenance raised during the most recent Maastricht iteration in March. Despite TEFAF’s attempts to improve vetting procedures, phrases like “Property of a Hong Kong Gentleman” and “Old German colonial collection” prevailed. 

David Gill, one of 13 first-time exhibitors at TEFAF New York, felt a buzz in the crowd that he attributes to the time of the year, even from his tucked-away perch in one of the Armory’s wood-accented, second-floor historical rooms. 

“It’s like Versailles up here with all the mirrors,” Gill said, gesturing to Jorge Pardo’s Meretricious (2015) series of sculptural frames, all named for different art critics. “Some people don’t want to make the stairs to get up here. But if they do, they’ll have a beautiful surprise,” he said, referring to the light reflecting off of two Zaha Hadid “Liquid Glacial” coffee tables (2012).

It’s easy to wander TEFAF and imagine the offerings not as art historical wonders, but as curios to sit in uber-wealthy people’s homes — especially at the jewelry booths (“I just had two men come by, one from Argentina and one from Mexico, who were here looking for Mother’s Day gifts,” says Fiona Druckenmiller, founder of New York’s FD Gallery), or when your mini-lecture on the provenance of Meret Oppenheim’s “Souvenir de ‘Déjeuner en Fourrure’” (1936/ 1972) is interrupted by an aggressive price check on the Sol Lewitt ($80,000). 

But for a weekend, why not lean into the fantasy? Only two of these Oppenheim prototypes exist, which Galleria d’Arte Maggiore’s Alessia Calarota explains are decades-later versions of her hugely popular 1936 cup-and-saucer sculpture. 

“The other one is owned by her granddaughter, and they’re working to open a museum house where she lived in Switzerland,” Calarota said. This one costs $120,000, and when I ask what kind of buyer the gallery imagines for it, she suggests, “Why not you?” (I laugh.)

There is a sense of real optimism for this market, though. Because Michele di Robilant of Robilant+Voena believes the New York collecting scene is “very active and strong at the moment,” the gallery wanted to bring their best — which meant multiple Lucio Fontanas and a massive bubblegum-pink Andy Warhol ($4 to 5 million). Robilant+Voena painted the walls of their booth to match.

Other galleries also tailored to the TEFAF crowd. Seoul’s The Page Gallery featured Yee Soo-kyung’s “Translated Vase_2021 TVG 6” (2021), made of ceramic shards and gold leaf that appeals to the design focus of the fair and to the current interest in the artist in New York. Her work is featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.

Gagosian’s booth, one of the very first on the fair’s main floor, synthesizes the concept of luxury and high-caliber craft. The gallery’s senior director, Andy Avini, always wanted to work with painter Anna Weyant on an art fair booth that would feature her work exclusively. This time around, he asked with enough advance notice, and Weyant set about making eight works with TEFAF in mind: square jewelry boxes with a cross necklace or pearl bracelet inside, sometimes with a red-dotted “sold” sticker ($90,000 each), and a larger painting of a bouquet in her of her signature haunting style ($300,000). Within two hours of the fair, all eight had sold, the gallery said in a sales report. 

Avini and Weyant collaborated on the booth’s pastel wall color, carpet, and furniture. “I wanted [the booth] to look like it fit in this fair perfectly,” Avini said. “Being up front, next to the jewelry; the scale of the works and the scale of the booth really working together … It’s special. It makes you think outside of the box a little bit.” 

Avini added, “Sometimes the market makes you fit into a square,” and the gallery’s much less tasteful display of Jeff Koons’s Incredible Hulk (2004–18) sculptures, concurrently on view at Frieze, came into my mind. “I like to break out of that.”