TEFAF NY 2026
Stand 330
Park Avenue Armory, New York

VIP Preview: Thursday, May 14, 2026
Public Dates: May 15-19, 2026

Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to participate in TEFAF New York 2026 with a curated presentation that brings together historical and contemporary visionaries in discourse. Encompassing painting, sculpture, photography and works on paper, the booth is an investigation into history, materiality, and form.

Shahzia Sikander is represented by an important mosaic, The Hour Glass, depicting interconnected floating figures, serving as a profound examination of layered cultural histories and intersectional identities. Through her dazzling use of materials and formal precision, Sikander’s continuously evolving practice is rooted in a feminist perspective, resiliency, and cultural heritage. Sam Moyer’s new Clipping painting extends her investigation into the material qualities of stone and its relationship to nature, by juxtaposing fragments of marble and granite into compositions evocative of plant-like forms. Jose Dávila’s new sculpture explores the relationship between objects, distilling the history of sculpture into its most fundamental action, placing objects in conjunction to each other. The booth also features a Dávila cut-out, based upon a Pablo Picasso painting. Concurrent to TEFAF, Dávila’s major solo exhibition, The Simple Act of Positioning is on view through May 30, at Sean Kelly, New York. For the first time we are pleased to present abstract sculptures by Magdiel García Almanza, which utilize reclaimed indigenous Cuban hard woods to reflect upon the lives, stories, and traditions of the country’s rich cultural history.

Both Rebecca Horn and Marcel Duchamp shared a profound interest in mechanical apparatuses. Rebecca Horn's sculpture employs mechanized styluses piercing a vitrine, echoing the body and recalling the armatures used in her early performances. A photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken by Man Ray reveals an intimate look into the artist’s vision for his Rotary Glass Plates, where the static, two-dimensional painted glass surfaces are activated into an ephemeral, three-dimensional illusion.

Throughout art history, the concept of fragmentation emerges as a prominent preoccupation through which contemporary artists, including Hugo McCloud, Julian Charrière, Idris Khan, Laurent Grasso, and Kehinde Wiley, engage in a profound analysis and reconstruction of cultural narratives. Referencing the long tradition of floral still-life painting, Hugo McCloud’s new work reimagines the genre through a contemporary lens, juxtaposing recycled plastic material with oil paint’s historical associations. This material tension is heightened by the interplay of light and shadow, which gives the work a quiet sense of movement despite its fixed form. Julian Charrière’s minimalist mirror, A Thousand Worlds, is constructed from the reclaimed silver extracted from thousands of old black-and-white photographs, becoming a symbolic reflection on personal histories, preservation and transformation. Idris Khan’s gold stamped painting condenses multiple layers of musical notes as a visual meditation on the passage of time, memory and ritual. Laurent Grasso’s Studies into the Past series merges historical eras with celestial phenomena proposing an alternative reality. Kehinde Wiley’s intimately scaled portrait positions subjects within the tradition of classical Western portraiture, challenging historical norms and redefining notions of identity, agency, and representation in today's culture.

A salon-style installation of intimate smaller works features pieces from a broad range of artistic practices. Edgar Degas’s drawing study for the painting Joséphine Gaujelin, 1867, depicts the delicate hands of the dancer and actress, shifting from robust lines to subtle shading rendered in pencil. A 1947 drawing by Louise Bourgeois depicts a totemic figure connecting the body, psyche and subjectivity, revealing the artist’s subconscious through her daily drawing ritual. Rooted in Latin American traditions, Hilda Palafox’s work on paper engages with the body’s relationship to the land, addressing themes of identity and resilience through a distinctly feminine lens. Evocative of the natural world, Janaina Tschäpe’s biomorphic forms and gestural marks of her watercolor painting functions as an expression of the artist’s interior thoughts. Pioneering Cuban artist Loló Soldevilla employs a mirror effect technique in her geometric abstraction, in which elements are reflected, with slight variations, across a vertical axis, mimicking the forms undulating in a dynamic musical composition.

Collectively, each artworks exemplify Sean Kelly Gallery's commitment to exhibiting artists whose unique practices challenge conventional norms and inspire discourse surrounding art history and the contemporary issues of today.

For all inquiries, please email info@skny.com

For more information on the fair, including hours and ticketing information, please visit tefaf.com