Name: TEFAF 2026
Start: 2026-03-14T11:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-03-14T19:00:00+01:00
Location: MECC Maastricht

Gallery Sofie Van de Velde is an Antwerp-based gallery known for its layered programme in which historical and contemporary positions are brought into dialogue. The gallery represents artists at different stages of their careers, ranging from emerging voices and mid-career artists to significant artist estates. This approach results in meaningful confrontations between past and present and is supported by an active international presence at leading art fairs, including TEFAF, The Armory Show, BRAFA, Art Brussels, Miart, Art Cologne, Artissima, and Paris Internationale.
Under the title ‘Private Spaces’, the gallery presents at TEFAF 2026 a carefully composed dialogue between modern and contemporary art. Exceptional works by the Belgian modernists James Ensor and Henri De Braekeleer are brought into confrontation with the contemporary painter Felix De Clercq (b. 1997), with the interior serving as a site of introspection, stillness, and mental reflection.
The booth installation centers on Ensor’s early masterpiece 'Le Salon Bourgeois' (1880), widely regarded as the first Impressionist painting produced in Belgium, marking James Ensor’s early engagement with the language of modern painting. Around this pivotal work, the presentation unfolds as a dialogue with the introspective interiors of Henri De Braekeleer and the contemporary paintings of Felix De Clercq, whose poetic observations of everyday life subtly echo the sensibilities of his modernist predecessors. Across more than a century, a shared fascination with the interior emerges, not merely as a physical space but as a mirror of inner worlds.
With ‘Private Spaces’, Gallery Sofie Van de Velde invites visitors to experience painting as a space of attention, nuance, and time, a place where looking slows down and meaning gradually unfolds.