TEFAF New York 2026 Preview Puts Tiffany Glass, Ancient Sculpture, and Cecily Brown in Focus
TEFAF New York 2026 is set to bring together objects that rarely share the same conversation: a Tiffany Studios window glowing with late-19th-century decorative ambition, an Egyptian goddess bust with a newly clarified history, and a Cecily Brown painting returning to the city where it last changed hands. The fair, which opens in New York this spring, is shaping up as a market snapshot as much as a display of connoisseurship.
Among the most eye-catching offerings is Tiffany Studios’ Birches and Irises window, made around 1915 and priced at $1.25 million by Macklowe Gallery. The leaded glass composition shows a sunset over water framed by birch trees and purple irises, drawing on French Art Nouveau and the Hudson River School. Its cartoon was drawn by Agnes Northrop, the only independent woman designer employed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and the artist behind some of the studio’s most atmospheric landscapes. The window was in the collection of Seymour and Evelyn Holtzman and sold at Christie’s New York for $571,500 in December 2025. At TEFAF, it will be installed in a custom lightbox to heighten the play of color and translucency.
David Aaron will present an Egyptian goddess bust dated to the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, during the reign of Amasis II (570-526BC), with a price of £1.5 million. The sculpture was rediscovered at a regional auction in England in 2022 after four decades in private hands and was long suspected to be a fake because of its glossy surface and unusually intact nose. More than a year of scientific study and art-historical research has now traced its provenance to a sale at Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1923. Material analysis identified the stone as greywacke, a dark sandstone prized in the Late Period for royal and divine figures. Restorer Kate Bowels said the object was structurally sound, but required careful removal of earlier interventions to reveal its history. Salomon Aaron, director of David Aaron, described it as “a sculpture with many stories.”
Berggruen Gallery will offer Cecily Brown’s Functor Hideaway, a 2008 painting priced at $3.9 million. The work was bought at Sotheby’s New York in May 2024 for $3.57 million and is returning to the city where Brown built much of her reputation after moving there in the 1990s. Her work is held by major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Salon 94 will also present John Kacere’s Marianne R at $750,000. Kacere made around 130 paintings of women’s bodies before his death in 1999, and his work remains closely associated with photorealism’s cool, exacting attention to surface. Taken together, the fair’s offerings suggest a market still attentive to objects with strong provenance, technical distinction, and a clear place in art history.
