TEFAF New York Offers Unrivaled Access to the World’s Best Fine Art, Bespoke Design, and High Jewelry
Learn why a highlight of TEFAF New York 2026, Leonora Carrington’s El gato (1951), presented by Leon Tovar Gallery, resonates powerfully with contemporary audiences.
Encountering the supernatural, three-eyed gaze of a spectral feline elevated to regal stature, her shape evokes the cat goddess Bastet’s historical link to Egyptian design principles. Primarily worshipped as a guardian feline, her role in Egyptian civilization intersects deeply with mathematical concepts. Embodying the Eye of Ra, Bastet is directly tied to the mathematical fractions used in accounting and sacred geometry. Moreover, historians like Herodotus described how her temple layout was a masterpiece of precise geometric symmetry.
Bastet is frequently named as the wife of Ptah, the patron deity of craft, construction, and architecture. While he oversees the logical blueprint, structural geometry, and the builder’s grid used to lay out temples, she imbues the spaces with internal life, warmth, and protective energy. Together, they represent the ideal union of physical form and spiritual essence.
Connecting with the subject’s gaze, we witness the depth of Leonora Carrington’s inquiry into esoteric texts detailing sacred geometry, alchemy, and the mathematical blueprints of the universe. Her characters frequently enact intricate, cryptic rituals within rigid, geometric environments.
A highlight of TEFAF New York 2026, Carrington’s El gato (1951), presented by Leon Tovar Gallery, a New York-based gallery specializing in Modern art from Latin America, resonates powerfully with contemporary viewers amid long overdue appreciation for women Surrealists. Undermined for decades by a male-dominated Surrealist movement that portrayed women as passive muses, lovers, or hysterics rather than serious artists, the British-Mexican and her female peers were marginalized through patriarchal structures. Their immense contributions were dwarfed by their relationships with famous men, relegating them to footnotes in the art historical canon. Leaving behind a far more profound legacy, Carrington transcends masculine Surrealism’s obsession with shocking imagery to birth an enduring feminist universe that subverts patriarchal structures with matriarchal power, domestic alchemy, and non-hierarchical ecosystems.
After you visit TEFAF New York, opening today at the Park Avenue Armory and on view through May 19, explore the sculptural splendor of Shape of Dreams Leonora Carrington, which opened yesterday and is on view through July 25 at L’SPACE in Chelsea. After decades dedicated mostly to painting, writing, and alchemy, Carrington devoted her later years to creating bronze and mixed-media sculptures that draw us deeper into ancient mythology, Celtic folklore, the occult, and human-animal hybrids. By delving into the past, Carrington drew us closer to our future. Contemporary philosophers like Giorgio Agamben dismantle traditional boundaries between humans and animals, arguing that the difference is not rooted in biology, but an artificial, political construction engineered by men to justify violence and control.
The red hot market for Carrington was fueled by the May 2024 sale of her painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) at Sotheby’s to Argentine billionaire Eduardo Costantini. The $28.5 million winning bid by the real estate developer and founder and chairman of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), was a ninefold surge over Carrington’s previous $3.3 million record, positioning her work as more valuable at auction than pieces by Salvador Dalí and her former partner Max Ernst. Carrington is now ranked as the fourth highest-selling Surrealist artist of all time, trailing René Magritte, Jean Miró, and Frida Kahlo, and the fifth highest-selling woman artist overall. Her 1951 bronze cat-head sculpture, La Grande Dame fetched $11.4 million at Sotheby’s on November 18, 2024.
Engage with an abstract, surreal animal form at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery booth, showcasing an aerodynamic, curved cabinet sculpture with multiple drawers by Marc Newson. Pod of Drawers (1987) exemplifies the mastery of contemporary design by marrying historical decorative arts, surrealism, and industrial manufacturing. The Australian designer reimagines Chiffonnier Anthropomorphe (1925), an anthropomorphic chest of drawers by French Art Deco cabinetmaker André Groult. Newson evolves Groult’s feminine-body-inspired curves and transforms the cabinet into an undulating, fluid sculpture resembling an abstract, organic form.
Trained as a jeweler, Newson built the cabinet by hand, approaching the aluminum paneling like metal marquetry or a specialized form of metal patchwork. He hand-beat and cut sheets of aircraft-grade aluminum and painstakingly attached them to a fluid fiberglass body using visible rivets to create a retro-futuristic shell. Art and design curiously collide with five functional drawers that follow the bulging contours of the frame which stands on painted black wood feet.
The array of exquisite works presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery signal the rapid proliferation of the global market for high-end handcrafted design and furniture. It is projected to blossom from $25.2 billion in 2025 to $43.4 billion by 2035, according to Future Market Insights (FMI). In the U.S. alone, the luxury furniture sector is expected to surge from $6.55 billion in 2026 to $8.17 billion by 2031, maintaining a 4.52% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), predicts FMI. Consumers are increasingly eschewing mass-produced minimalist interiors to covet bespoke, structurally organic statement pieces that convey quiet luxury and are committed to elite artisanship, and high-integrity provenance storytelling.
Making its U.S. market debut at TEFAF New York 2026, Hong Kong-based high jewelry house FORMS offers works that feature dreamlike, illusionistic, and biomorphic elements that achieve a surreal quality through technical illusion and the juxtaposition of contrasting materials. Founded in 2010 by Elad Assor and Tzvika Janover, the appointment-only atelier produces fewer than 100 bespoke, highly architectural pieces each year.
The emerald and diamond shakudo ring, for example, seems to defy gravity. Two meticulous step-cut stones – a vivid, high-clarity green emerald and a step-cut white diamond – are mounted corner-to-corner without any visible prongs or obtrusive metal borders separating them. They appear to float effortlessly next to each other over the envied hand. Matte-dark shakudo frames absorb surrounding light, creating a void-like border that transforms the emerald and the diamond into glowing, weightless portals. Shakudo (赤銅) is a traditional Japanese metallurgical alloy historically used in samurai sword fittings and now utilized in avant-garde high jewelry.
The jewels dazzle in the atmospheric environment created by Hong Kong–based In Situ & Partners, transforming the traditional fair stand into an intimate jewel-box setting. Set within one of the historic rooms of the Park Avenue Armory, the site-specific immersive experience draws on subtle sacral references and engages in a cross-centuries dialogue with the building’s original 19th-century boiserie, herringbone floors, and fireplace. Fairgoers are welcomed through a semi-transparent golden mesh screen into a sequence of three lacquered niches crafted by Italian studio Materica. Marble pedestals hold up each piece as a singular object of contemplation. Almond-green textile walls, deep burgundy carpeting, and brushed-bronze vitrines elevate the mood, curate a deeply textured palette to evoke an atmosphere of intimate, understated drama.
A four-time participant at TEFAF Maastricht, the FORMS entry into the U.S. market signals the growth of high jewelry, defined by unique, bespoke, or highly limited pieces priced above $100,000. While entry-level luxury categories flounder, the global high jewelry market is experiencing a structural boom, valued at $30.7 billion, according to Intel Market Research, driven by macroeconomic trends, shifting demographics, and a pivot toward hard luxury assets.
Both TEFAF Maastricht and TEFAF New York are organized by The European Fine Art Foundation and adhere to the same incomparably rigorous, industry-standard vetting practices, which gives institutions and elite collectors the confidence of attaining inimitable, impeccable quality that is lacking or absent in other marketplaces. While TEFAF Maastricht encompasses the depth and breadth of all art history, TEFAF New York offers a more intimate experience celebrating primarily 20th-century Modernism and contemporary works.
In a conversation with my 16-year-old son at last night’s preview, art world savior, philanthropist and chair emerita of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Barbara Tober, heralded the 11th edition of TEFAF New York “a truly wonderful place to be.”
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NOTE: When written with a lowercase “s”, surrealism refers broadly to any art, literature, or aesthetic style that incorporates bizarre, fantastic, or dreamlike elements. Surrealism with a capital “S” denotes the avant-garde intellectual, political, and artistic movement founded in Paris in 1924 by writer André Breton.