"The 8 Best Booths at TEFAF Maastricht, From a Rare Artemisia Gentileschi to a Two-Sided de Chirico"
by Sarah Belmont
Demisch Danant, which focuses on 20th-century design, is returning to TEFAF with a selection of unique pieces by Joseph-André Motte (1925–2013), who would mostly offer his services to the industrial world. That makes his dining table with a bronze base, commissioned for the private home of the collecting couple the Stellins, so special. The work by Motte, who, like many of his 1960s counterparts, would incorporate glass in his designs, is here surrounded with pieces by his older friend and sometimes collaborator Maxime Old (1910–91) and paintings by French painter Eugène Leroy (1910–2000), who happens to be the subject of two retrospectives in France, at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and at MUba, the museum named after him in his hometown of Tourcoing. This is not the reason for his presence at TEFAF, however. Leroy is known within France for his paintings made during the 1980s, but Danant has been collecting works the artist made during the ’50s and ’60s for years. It is neither the first time he has put him forward at the fair, and it will probably not be the last either.
