Calling Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s solo presentation on the Armory Present a “booth” feels by some means unsuitable, like a discount of the all-encompassing sanctum that she and Toronto gallery Patel Brown assembled for the Manhattan artwork honest. Suspended gently from wood rods are billowing linocut and gyotaku prints on handmade Japanese washi paper in deep indigos and earth tones. In conversations with attendees on the honest’s opening day, Hatanaka shared that she has bipolar dysfunction, and that her landscapes are knowledgeable partly by her analysis into evolutionary theories for the situation as a type of climactic adaptation.
Hatanaka, a primary timer on the Armory Present, mentioned she was moved and gratified by guests’ responses. “It’s still quite stigmatized to talk about bipolar, even though there’s more conversation about mental health,” she instructed me. “I think telling my story has been kind of disarming to people, allowed them to be vulnerable.”
For all of the whispers concerning the market downturn, gallery closures, and artwork honest shake-ups, a crisp air of first-day-of-school pleasure lower by the drab halls of the Javits Middle in the course of the Armory Present’s VIP preview on Thursday, September 4. Typically accompanying the gallerists fielding collectors’ inquiries had been the artists themselves, lots of them displaying for the primary time on the modern-day incarnation of the historic exhibition the place Marcel Duchamp shocked American audiences together with his dizzying 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.”
“It is a classic, world-famous fair, and it is the ambition of every artist to show there, particularly if you come from Europe … or the edge of Europe, in my case,” mentioned Irish artist Alice Maher, whose drawing “The Glorious Maid (of the Charnel House)” (2016) is displayed in a nook at David Nolan Gallery’s sales space of 100 drawings from 1944 to the current. Maher may “hardly believe,” she mentioned, that her work is hanging within the firm of such figures as Hannah Wilke, Dorothea Rockburne, Etel Adnan, and Ellsworth Kelly.
Alejandro García Contreras at his sales space with Swivel Gallery
Diagonally throughout from Patel Brown’s sales space is New York’s personal Swivel Gallery, the place ceramic works by Alejandro García Contreras stopped attendees of their tracks. The Guadalajara-based artist, one other newcomer to the Armory, mentioned that although his follow dates again to 2002, he’s glad this second didn’t come sooner. “In some ways it was complex and discouraging,” García Contreras instructed me in Spanish, reflecting on his early years, “but it helped me build up the patience not to do something stupid.”
Although his sculptures at the moment are hyper-detailed, Boschian constructions dripping in symbolism, the artist’s earliest inspiration got here from motion figures — particularly the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — which, as a baby, he didn’t a lot play with as research to determine how they had been made.
“That’s where the origin of my obsession with the sculptural object comes from,” García Contreras mentioned. “Sometimes I think, ‘Wow, when I was a kid, it was my dream to make action figures. And now I’m making collectibles for adults. I’ve made it.’”
Storm Ascher of Superpositions Gallery, with works by Ryan Cosbert and Marcus Leslie Singleton
There’s at all times contemporary blood on the Armory, partly because of the participation of first-time galleries. The massive 4 (Gagosian, Hauser, Zwirner, Tempo) haven’t confirmed on the honest in years, choosing Frieze (which additionally owns the Armory Present) and the varied Artwork Basels. However notably absent in the principle part this yr are different main gamers, corresponding to Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Lelong (which hasn’t been on the Armory since 2023), Almine Rech, and Kasmin (at the moment transitioning into a brand new gallery began by two companions). Youthful galleries — a few of which instructed Hyperallergic that they acquired a last-minute name from Armory Present organizers this yr providing them a sales space — are desirous to step up, and the Presents part, notably devoted to rising areas not more than 10 years previous, is barely bigger than in previous editions.
“This is one of those things that always felt like a prestigious dream,” mentioned Storm Ascher, who opened her gallery Superpositions seven years in the past in a style pop-up area in downtown LA that was nonetheless cluttered with clothes. “I sold a Haleigh Nickerson piece for, like, $1,500, and broke even on my rent,” Asher recalled. “And now we have Nickerson showing at Frieze LA next year. It feels like a full circle moment.” The gallery’s program facilities artists from the African diaspora, and its two-person sales space options Ryan Cosbert and Marcus Leslie Singleton. The latter’s “Yellow Field in the Catskills” (2025) is drenched in a luminous hue (“butter yellow, the color of the summer,” mentioned Ascher, quoting the artist); it’s exhausting to not really feel unfettered pleasure radiating from the canvas, even when the works are underpinned by intimate moments of pause and introspection.
Artist Elisabeth Perrault on the Armory Present, the place she’s displaying a ceramic work with Carvalho Gallery
Throughout the disorienting Armory Present map, almost each sightline reveals work by artists who’ve by no means earlier than exhibited right here — a reminder that gala’s, with all their pitfalls, can nonetheless function a stage for brand new voices. Montréal-based ceramic and textile artist Elisabeth Perrault first attended the honest in 2023 as a customer, letting herself get misplaced within the endlessly dizzying rows of cubicles. This yr, her huge set up “Ces géants qui se nourrissent de soleil (Sunflowers)” (2024) is the head-turning centerpiece of Carvalho Gallery’s presentation. Within the nonprofit part, the Storefront for Artwork and Structure boasts an array of whimsical sculptures of fruits, crops, and different natural parts by the late artist Ming Fay: a rounded pear, a larger-than-life oyster, a pepper. Jessica Kwok, the group’s affiliate curator, is “99% sure” that Fay has by no means been included on the Armory earlier than — an irony contemplating the sculptor’s legacy in New York Metropolis’s public artwork circuit. Busy commuters trying down at their screens may whiz previous his glass mosaics on the Delancey-Essex Avenue subway station free of charge, whereas honest guests who shelled out for tickets cease to marvel at his mastery of froth, ceramic, and papier-mâché.
Over at Praxis Gallery, which has areas in New York and Buenos Aires, it’s exhausting to seize a photograph of 4 of the six artists within the sales space — all displaying for the primary time on the honest — in between playful exchanges, bursts of laughter, and interruptions from curious collectors. Amongst them is Josefina Concha, a Chilean artist whose color-soaked, machine-sewn textile items evoke pure kinds, from fungal shapes to the concentric circles of tree trunks.
Left to proper: artists Darlene Charneco, Josefina Concha E., Elisa Lutteral, and Tamika Rivera with Director Carolina Constantino on the sales space of Praxis Gallery
In opposition to all odds, the power is palpable. “I walked in and thought, ‘It feels like 10 years ago,’” vendor Leo Koenig instructed me. “And I mean that as a compliment.”
The wide-eyed enthusiasm, the fantastic style of the primary sale, the lingering gaze of a curator … maybe it’s all too trite, a part of the art-world-industrial advanced that retains the wheels turning whereas obfuscating its darker undertones and nagging inequalities. However what if we may distill that thrill into one thing new, channel the spark into an alternative choice to the market monopoly of the blue-chip?
Elbert Joseph Perez together with his work “The Swimmers” (2025) at Chozick Household Artwork Gallery’s sales space
On the Armory, some exhibitors signify the business’s altering tides, which have cautiously embraced collaborative fashions. Chozick Household Artwork Gallery, as an illustration, based simply final yr by Rachel Uffner alumna Rebekah Chozick, shares its Decrease Manhattan area with JDJ and Deanna Evans Tasks, alternating on month-to-month exhibitions. The gallery is making its debut on the honest, as are the 2 painters in its sales space: Elbert Joseph Perez and Christopher Paz-Rivera (co-founder of the Puerto Rican gallery Embajada, which has been on the Armory earlier than as an exhibitor. Head spinning but?).
Works by Elbert Joseph Perez and Christopher Paz-Rivera introduced by Chozick Household Artwork Gallery
Standing by his portray “The Swimmers,” depicting a rubber duck nonchalantly drifting previous the pair of arms thrashing above the floor of the oil-slicked water, Perez mentioned he goals to seize the universality of human experiences and the necessity to empathize with others. The artist, who has a finger in a splint from his job as a mechanic and who shared that his first solo present was organized by his therapist, is candid and forthcoming about what it’s prefer to be a first-timer on the honest, admitting that he feels an “incongruence” between his skilled presence and his actual identification.
“I think if you were to tell my younger self that I’d be here, it wouldn’t compute at all,” he mentioned. “Everyone is really cool or really beautiful, or wandering around with something going on, but I have a feeling that we’re all in a state of anxiety. We’re all really weird, and we’re all putting on a performance.”
