The Armory Show Expands Again

“The art world is much bigger now than a decade ago,” Stockholm-based art advisor Ebba von Beetzen Liska said on the phone as we debriefed this year’s Armory Arts Week. “More people are interested in visual art and there are more collectors and galleries overall.” 235 galleries are participating in The Armory Show 2024 and 55 are new to the fair. A number that is closer to their pre-Frieze New York heydays. In 2014 there were 203 exhibitors, however, in 2011, one year before Frieze New York launched and served as a large competitor, there were 274 exhibitors across its modern and contemporary sections. In general art fairs are owned by companies that hold multiple fairs in their portfolios and Frieze recently acquired Armory. “Although I visit many fairs, the only two that are fixed in my calendar are Art Basel Basel and the Nordic Fair Market,” von Beetzen Liska concluded. It is difficult to rival Basel in Basel.

As a newcomer to the city, it was exciting to see how New Yorkers lived with their art during visits to private collector’s homes as a part of The Armory Show’s VIP program. The Horts, Morses, and other participating collectors were cheery and welcoming, sadly this programming ended with the pandemic. A new exclusive-feeling trend is that exhibitions are being held in apartments on Billionaires Row—Bienvenue Steinberg and C co-hosted an exhibition curated by Valérie Cueto in the Steinway Tower which presented design and art, among them decentred peace sign paintings by Mia Enell—“because paths to peace are always shifting,”—in her words, who is represented by B-S&C. “The crowd is posh. A lot of venture capitalists and designers, and some museum people,” artist Anoushka Bhalla texted me before I arrived. This shift from collectors opening their homes in the VIP program, or more broadly from apartment gallery shows, to real estate brokers instrumentalizing curators and art to reach UHNWI is a testament to the potential of art for other industries, or what tentacles art is through to have in our time. Either way, the curators’ selections were engaging and the view over Central Park on one side and the city on the other was incredible.

At the fair, booths in the curated section had anchoring in history, rich conceptual framework, and inventive exhibition design. Rounded shapes and natural forms, sculpted in ceramics and drawn, characterized the work in Henrique Faria New York’s booth “Feminine Ecology” with works by Venezuelan artist Mercedes Elena González (drawings) and Trinidadian artist Valerie Brathwaite (ceramics). The catalog text, written by Jenni Sorkin, describes how González, a non-English speaker living in the U.S. at the age of 24, seems to have tapped into the feminist zeitgeist of the 1970’s when when she made the works on view. Some of the shapes reminisce Matisse’s collage work. A couple of large sculptures, like bodies, and sculptures on pedestals crowd the booth while the wallworks are hung at eye level and above–everything feels dynamic, almost weightless while some pops of bright red, yellow, and green hues unite the two artists.

Also in this section, the jaw-dropping presentation of Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela at Asya Geisberg Gallery was written up in both Artnet and the Observer, with good reason. The white ceramic sculptures in skeletal-like forms with Mesoamerican cultural symbolism installed on the wall, beside, and behind photographs of sculptures were striking against the all-black wall and floor and recalled exhibition design in part with a design or jewelry exhibition. The solo booth with Liliana Porter’s work at Secrist Beach run by her long-time gallerist Carrie Secrist, was delightful. A lime green toy soldier standing with his rifle pointed towards an inconspicuous and unflinching wide-eyed piggy bank is thought-provoking. Porter’s work is quirky as it humorously engages with labor, production, and capitalism using toys and figurines to represent larger societal ideas.

Sprinkled throughout the fair were artists that I was happy to see move into new contexts. New to Halsey Mckay’s rooster is Layo Bright. Glass sculptures, one inspired by Nefertiti or Nigerian (where she is from) Ife head, perhaps, and a wallwork overlaid with intricate floral details—more tchotchke than hyperrealist—were expertly crafted by the artists in at Urban Glass. Bright also has a solo exhibition Dawn and Dusk at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut open through October 27. In the two works on view at his Los Angeles Gallery Vielmetter Nate Lewis continues to stray from his stark black and white color palette incorporating subtle colors. He was first included in a group show with the gallery in July 2023 and later that year they brought his work to Art Basel Miami. He is also represented by Fridman Gallery in New York.

It is not often that an artwork at a fair can strike a deeply pensive or emotional chord, but Vanessa german’s multi-headed—from a young girl in pigtails to a weathered face with stains—sculpture titled “I am that too” or “the soul is its own archive” with a vessel-like body was jarring. The artist writes in the caption of her Instagram post: “how can we talk about this at the javitz center in the rush & karma & Tesla truck of it all?” To be clear, it hit advisor Alexandra Goldman and I like a truck, dead in our tracks, and we stayed awhile to discuss it. The tone of the piece was completely different from her solo presentation at Frieze LA earlier this year where pop-cultural style melded with chinoiserie and other decorative art elements in pink quartz. A poetry event, however, at a local non-profit that brought some audience members to tears struck the same deep chord, uncovering facets of the human experience.

“It’s an exciting time for the South Asian market in the United States,” Roma Patel Nature Morte’s newest Associate Director, wrote to Cultbytes after the close of the fair. In January, shortly before retiring from the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote that “Atlas” one Sagarika Sundaram’s textile works belonged in a museum. The Brooklyn-based artist is a current Silver Arts Project resident, but has, according to Patel, four studios in the city where she stores, dyes, and works with wool to create both large and mid-scale work. The artists ambition is clear in the work constituting of textile squares in dyed and worked on using various techniques as a nod to India’s rich textile tradition at Nature Morte’s booth. Another material experimentation can be found at Galeria Karen Huber, which is Mexico City-based, Allan Villavicencio’s double-sided painting in the shape of a folding screen in Mexico City merged traditional painting with design, or decorative art, creating a gorgeous expanded or sculptural painting.

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