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Jul 14, 2023

The 10 Best Booths at the Armory Show, From Pregnant Cyborgs to Sleek Figuration

Summer vacation is officially finished for dealers all over the world, and many

Summer vacation is officially finished for dealers all over the world, and many of them kicked off the fall season in New York this week at the Armory Show. For the second year in a row, the Armory Show was held in the Javits Center, lending the show far more space than it had previously. The fair has also grown dramatically since last year's iteration, as more and more galleries return to business as usual.

Some dealers said sales hadn't come as quickly as they’d hoped during the fair's VIP preview on Thursday, and the crowds in the aisles seemed thinner than they’d been in pre-Covid editions. But a good number of people turned out for the occasion, including artist Judy Chicago, actor Paul Rudd, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak, writer Roxane Gay, and collectors like Bernard Lumpkin, Beth Rudin DeWoody, and the couple Don and Mera Rubell.

Galleries appeared to greet the fair as a place to show off some of their more unconventional offerings. For those who wanted it, there were a good deal of fresh-to-market paintings and big, expensive-looking sculptures. Most of the art on view, however, tended to be more understated and less conventional.

This week, Manila's Silverlens is set to inaugurate its New York gallery, but ahead of that opening, it commanded space at the Armory Show, where it was showing work by three artists from its roster. The biggest work on view came courtesy of Mit Jai Inn, a Thai painter whose 2019 piece Patchwork runs nearly 18 feet long. Composed of painted strips of canvas, its ribbon-like pieces are woven tightly in some areas and allowed to hang loose in others. According to the gallery, Mit has envisioned the work as something akin to a map for an alternate society, perhaps one in which people are knitted together in more egalitarian ways. A legend in the Thai art scene, Mit has never had a solo show in the U.S.; it's high time that changed.

If you’re going to make proper use of your fair booth, why not transform the walls into art, too? The Glasgow-based artist France-Lise McGurn has wisely used every corner of Simon Lee Gallery's sizable booth, which she's covered with painted outlines of intersecting figures. They mirror what's displayed in her paintings: barely-there women whose bodies appear to double, fuse, and combine, à la Francis Picabia's "transparencies." Sleek, winsome, and eye-catching (all good things in a busy art-fair setting), McGurn's paintings tickle the eye, providing visual pleasure to spare. A nice little flourish: the cigarette with lipstick marks that's juts out from the booth's wall near its exit.

The centerpiece of Campoli Presti's booth is a piece of furniture quite unlike any other at this fair: an untitled sculpture by Kianja Strobert that performs triple duty as an artwork, a place to sit, and a holder for the gallery's business cards. Crafted to resemble a bench, the piece has affixed to it ready-made pictures of a chic seating area in a house and a woman's wrist with a bracelet being placed on it. There's also, for some reason, a lit candle. In a way similar to Rachel Harrison's pleasantly odd sculptures, this work holds its own by resisting any easy readings. It's kept in good company by nice-looking paintings by Xylor Jane, Cheyney Thompson, Rochelle Feinstein, and others.

Most of this Chicago gallery's booth is given over to Julien Creuzet, a young French-Caribbean artist whose work has gained a following in the Paris art scene in the past few years. Much of what he produces are abstract twists of plastic, metal, and fabric that are tied together and often hung from walls. He's likened these works to assemblages formed from urban refuse, comparing them to evidence of city living. Their poetic titles, however, hint at places that exist far beyond the world as we know it. Here's one from one of his new works: Our eyes have seen the underside of the seas, submerged mountains, the salt clinging to our pupils our eyes have beaded tears to ripple the waves above our elongated bodies our eyes are watching you (Ojo de Horus, naranja). At the Armory, works such as that one are tastefully placed alongside sculptural pieces by Erin Jane Nelson, who arrays photographs of natural settings amid ceramic flowers.

Hot off a Museum of Fine Arts, Houston retrospective last year, the 90-year-old Olga de Amaral is still at the top of her game, making works composed of woven pieces of fiber that combine to create gorgeous abstractions. Richard Saltoun Gallery is offering a taster of her older works, many of which are composed of little more than rows of fabric strips that hang downward. Flores #16 (Flowers #16), from ca. 1985, features mauve and red tendrils of wool that are each tied at the end with horsehair. It evokes a bed of flowers that shimmers in the wind—not a small feat, given how minimal its means are.

The provisions depicted by Lucia Hierro in her sculptures will be familiar to most New Yorkers: Rice Select boxes of quinoa, Stacy's bags of pita chips, Canada Dry bottles of ginger ale. All of these are found in abundance in grocery stores around the city, and Hierro stocked her wall-hung sacks with photo replicas of them. She seems to be toasting these goods as emblems of the city she's long called home, raising them to the status of art itself. At the center of the booth is sculpture of a Café Bustelo package of coffee grounds. Seen in most bodegas, the coffee bag would be a tiny, banal object that you could hold in your palm and purchase for a few dollars. In Hierro's hands, however, it's grown in size and price—and in significance, too.

In the Armory Show's Platform section, for oversized works, Buenos Aires's Rolf Art is showing a 90-foot-long photogram by Roberto Huarcaya that towers over viewers’ heads. The Peruvian artist produced the work by exposing photosensitive paper to foliage from the Bahuaja Sonene nature reserve at night. He then developed the ghostly results using river water that was harvested nearby. Huarcaya has rendered the leaves and greenery eerily present, yet the actual plants themselves are nowhere to be seen—a possible allusion, it seems, to the rapid destruction of the Amazon jungle due to climate change. Adding to the mystique is the work's unusual exhibition style, in which part of this rolled-up photogram is unfurled across a platform that rises and falls, mimicking the crests and troughs of a wave.

In general, this is a fair that is woefully devoid of the kind of weirdness that makes seeing art fun. You can't say that Andréhn-Schiptjenko didn't at least try to change that, however. Its entire booth is given over to the Argentine artist Cecilia Bengolea, who has on view a body of paintings and videos about worker-led protests. For the videos being shown here, Bengolea has superimposed ballet dancers onto footage of a steel plant. They twist and turn as sheets of metal are produced, their movements becoming a strike of sorts. The other video, titled Maria's Hardship (2022), features a pregnant robot-like figure that shimmies around a smokestack. Although this cyborg looks like something that could have rolled off the production line, it refuses to participate in whatever activities her makers had in mind.

Jennifer Bartlett, the painter who died earlier this year, gets a tender tribute courtesy of Philadelphia's Locks Gallery, which gave her a number of shows during her lifetime. Bartlett's paintings are plainspoken and seemingly rather simple, and for that reason, they’re likely to be missed by many visitors to his fair. Let me suggest, however, that you make a moment for Bayshore Walk (1976–77), a grouping of 72 paintings that are all done in enamel on baked steel sheets. Divided neatly into nine-piece groups that assemble to form coherent images, this painting features, in one half, four house-like forms, each in different colors. In the other half, these structures dissolve into messes of colorful strokes, their minimal roofs just barely visible beneath. It suggests a contemporary take on Monet's famed "Meules" paintings, which chronicle a haystack as it changes amid shifting weather and daylight conditions. It also offers a slow, spare respite amid the crush of the Armory Show, where good art can go unseen amid old-fashion wheeling and dealing.

Dave Kimelberg, a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians, made a splash in 2020, when he opened K Art, which is now among the few commercial galleries in the U.S. owned by an Indigenous person. In its debut at the Armory Show, the gallery demonstrated that it is definitely worth watching. Its offerings include pieces by Erin Gingrich (Koyukon Athabaskan, Inupiaq), whose handsome wall-hung sculptures are delicately strung through with strings of glass beads, and G. Peter Jemison (Seneca), a recent star of MoMA PS1's Greater New York quinquennial. Native Nations Sovereign (2019), a painting by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho) that features the names of cities throughout the U.S. and the names of Indigenous nations, presides over the booth.