Calling Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s solo presentation on the Armory Present a “sales space” 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 picket 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 partially 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 nonetheless fairly stigmatized to speak about bipolar, regardless that there’s extra dialog about psychological well being,” she informed me. “I feel telling my story has been type of disarming to folks, allowed them to be weak.”
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 reduce by means of the drab halls of the Javits Middle throughout the Armory Present’s VIP preview on Thursday, September 4. Usually accompanying the gallerists fielding collectors’ inquiries have been the artists themselves, a lot of them exhibiting for the primary time on the modern-day incarnation of the historic exhibition the place Marcel Duchamp shocked American audiences along with his dizzying 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.”
“It’s a traditional, world-famous honest, and it’s the ambition of each artist to indicate there, notably in case you come from Europe … or the sting of Europe, in my case,” mentioned Irish artist Alice Maher, whose drawing “The Superb Maid (of the Charnel Home)” (2016) is displayed in a nook at David Nolan Gallery’s sales space of 100 drawings from 1944 to the current. Maher may “hardly imagine,” she mentioned, that her work is hanging within the firm of such figures as Hannah Wilke, Dorothea Rockburne, Etel Adnan, and Ellsworth Kelly.
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 observe dates again to 2002, he’s glad this second didn’t come sooner. “In some methods it was advanced and discouraging,” García Contreras informed me in Spanish, reflecting on his early years, “but it surely helped me construct up the persistence to not do one thing silly.”
Although his sculptures at this time 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 have been made.
“That’s the place the origin of my obsession with the sculptural object comes from,” García Contreras mentioned. “Generally I feel, ‘Wow, once I was a child, it was my dream to make motion figures. And now I’m making collectibles for adults. I’ve made it.’”
There’s at all times contemporary blood on the Armory, partially due to 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 primary part this yr are different main gamers, akin to Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Lelong (which skipped 2024 too), Almine Rech, and Kasmin (at present transitioning into a brand new gallery began by two companions). Youthful galleries — a few of which informed Hyperallergic that they received a last-minute name from Armory Present organizers this yr providing them a sales space — are wanting 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.
“That is a type of issues that at all times felt like a prestigious dream,” mentioned Storm Ascher, who opened her gallery Superpositions seven years in the past in a vogue pop-up area in downtown LA that was nonetheless cluttered with clothes. “I bought a Haleigh Nickerson piece for, like, $1,500, and broke even on my lease,” Asher recalled. “And now we’ve Nickerson exhibiting at Frieze LA subsequent yr. It appears like a full circle second.” 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 Subject within the Catskills” (2025) is drenched in a luminous hue (“butter yellow, the colour of the summer season,” 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.
Throughout the disorienting Armory Present map, practically each sightline reveals work by artists who’ve by no means earlier than exhibited right here — a reminder that festivals, 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% positive” 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 wanting down at their screens may whiz previous his glass mosaics on the Delancey-Essex Road 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 places in New York and Buenos Aires, it’s exhausting to seize a photograph of 4 of the six artists within the sales space — all exhibiting 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.
Towards all odds, the power is palpable. “I walked in and thought, ‘It appears like 10 years in the past,’” vendor Leo Koenig informed me. “And I imply that as a praise.”
The wide-eyed enthusiasm, the wonderful 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?
On the Armory, some exhibitors characterize the trade’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 Initiatives, 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?).
Standing by his portray “The Swimmers,” depicting a rubber duck nonchalantly drifting previous the pair of palms 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 id.
“I feel in case you have been to inform my youthful self that I’d be right here, it wouldn’t compute in any respect,” he mentioned. “Everybody is de facto cool or actually stunning, or wandering round with one thing occurring, however I’ve a sense that we’re all in a state of tension. We’re all actually bizarre, and we’re all placing on a efficiency.”
