Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to participate in TEFAF New York 2025 with a carefully curated presentation that brings together historical and contemporary voices in dialogue across time, materials, and forms. The selection includes works that investigate history, identity, and transformation.
Our booth features a major Mariko Mori sculpture, Plasma Stones II, which combines technology and spirituality to portray cosmic origins through luminous forms. Referencing the plasma state of the universe, Mori invites viewers to contemplate the unseen forces that shape existence. A new work from Sam Moyer’s Clippings series merges architectural structure and gestural abstraction. Inlaying stone into canvas, Moyer evokes natural rhythms and light, offering meditative reflections on materiality and transformation. The artist has concurrent solo exhibitions at Sean Kelly, New York and the Hill Art Foundation, New York.
Janaina Tschäpe, Kehinde Wiley, Hugo McCloud and Idris Khan’s works reframe traditional artistic genres—portraiture, landscape, and text—through deeply personal and socially engaged perspectives. Tschäpe’s painting captures the fluid interplay between physical and emotional landscapes expressed through vibrant, gestural abstraction. Wiley’s powerful new painting, Portrait of El Hadji Malick Gueye, reimagines classical figuration through a contemporary lens, interrogating race, status, and representation. McCloud’s still-life transforms plastic into delicate, painterly compositions. Referencing traditional floral painting, the series invites reflection on beauty, temporality, and environmental degradation. While Khan’s densely layered painting, built from repeated stamped texts on aluminum panel, explores the collapse of time, memory, and meaning.
Both Laurent Grasso and Wu Chi-Tsung manipulate time and perception to reimagine visual languages of the past and present moment. Grasso’s Studies into the Past series investigates the intersection of natural phenomena and historical imagery, blurring the boundaries between truth and illusion, science and art. Chi-Tsung’s cyanotype collage pieces similarly bridge ancient traditions and contemporary experimentation to evoke shan shui landscapes.
Yves Klein’s La Victoire de Samothrace, is a vivid reworking of the iconic ancient sculpture in the artist’s signature International Klein Blue, embodying his vision of immateriality and transcendence. A monochrome IKB painting demonstrates how the pigment becomes a portal to the sublime, offering a sensory experience rooted in color as concept. Also on the booth, is Klein’s iconic work, Leap Into the Void, which captures his fascination with performance as well as his exploration of photography’s inherent malleability: its capacity to manipulate truth while maintaining the appearance of fact. Together these works illustrate Klein’s radical approach to form, matter, and metaphysical presence.
A salon-style installation on one wall highlights the significance of drawing across several artists' practices. A work on paper by Rebecca Horn reveals the delicacy and intensity with which the artist uses drawing and gesture as a poetic tool. William Kentridge’s emotionally charged drawing fuses narrative and abstraction, animation and politics, to portray the psychological consequences of apartheid and the complexities of South African identity. An intricately layered drawing by Shahzia Sikander blends Indo-Persian miniature painting with contemporary iconography to address questions of migration and cultural hybridity. Arte Povera pioneer, Jannis Kounellis’s historical drawing of a smoking chimney, transforms fire into a symbol of change, memory, and loss. In this evocative image, the chimney becomes a modern memento mori—an allegory for industry, disappearance, and the poetic afterlife of creation.
Together, these works reflect Sean Kelly Gallery’s commitment to artists whose practices push boundaries and provoke thoughtful engagement with the world around us.
For all inquiries, please email info@skny.com
For more information on the fair, including hours and ticketing information, please visit tefaf.com