The Best Booths at the 2026 Armory Show, New York
The 32nd edition of the Armory Show opened to VIPs Thursday at the Javits Center with a seemingly slower pace than in years past. That might have something to do with its earlier start time (10 a.m., instead of the typical 11 a.m.) and a change from the week after Labor Day to the end of September. For much of the morning, the fair was relatively uncrowded, though groups of people could be seen congregating on the benches facing the Platform section. When I walked by the smallest of the fair’s three cafes around 2 p.m., I noticed there was no line—which to my mind is often a good indicator of just how many people are in attendance. This edition is notable for its new floorplan, which has put the Focus section just to the left of the main entrance and spread the Solo section out throughout the fair. There’s much to see from the around 230 galleries participating in this year’s fair with strong showings in the Presents and Focus sections, the latter of which was organized by Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth curator María Elena Ortiz. Below, a look at the best booths at the 2026 Armory Show, which runs through Sunday. - John Shen at Praise Shadows If you’ve visited the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s current Decennial exhibition, you might recognize a work on the floor of the Armory Show: a sculpture by John Shen that is on loan to Boston-based gallery Praise Shadows for the run of the fair. To make After Image (2024), Shen left the piece’s 14-inch CRT television on for four years straight, displaying an image of the artist’s mother taken about a year or two before she gave birth to him. Because of this, the photograph has been permanently inscribed onto the monitor’s screen. Connecting the experiment with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, Shen was moved to display the image during the pandemic when he went years without being able to visit his mother, who lives in New Zealand. Playing on the monitor is a 48-minute video in which Shen subjects himself to a Thematic Apperception Test, a psychological evaluation that “uses a series of ambiguous images to delve into an individual’s personality, emotions, and subconscious conflicts”; his wife, who is off camera, conducts the exam. Also on view are striking direct positive photographs by Shen that were taken with a camera he constructed over the course of a year made up of some 28,000 black cocktail straws. At the preview on Thursday, he walked me over to one and asked me what I saw. I said it appeared to be two figures performing some kind of modernist dance. “Perfect—I love that,” he said in response. In fact, the unique print is a photograph of a floral arrangement from his “Bouquet” series. The effect is stunning, with the straws creating an analog pixelation that abstracts this familiar image until it is unrecognizable, a gesture that is in line with the artist’s fascination with psychoanalysis. - Summer Mei Ling Lee at Re.Riddle Across the way from Praise Shadow’s booth is an equally delicate solo by the artist Summer Mei Ling Lee. The focal point of the booth is When Fox is a Thousand (2026), a commission for the Museo delle Culture di Milano for the 2026 Winter Olympics. Onto a series of lengths of gauze that hang from the ceiling, she has painted in Sumi ink a scene of reverie in a snow blizzard. The most striking works in the booth are the ones from the artist’s “into the nearness of distance,” which similarly employs gauze, onto which she has made cyanotypes that she then layers. Influenced by the writings of philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, the works contemplate how a memory of a loved one can at times both make you feel both closer and further from them. - Paul Gardère at Magenta Plains Magenta Plains, which is marking its 10th anniversary with an exhibition that opened this week, has a suite of fascinating assemblage works by Paul Gardère, who died in 2011 and whose estate the gallery began representing earlier this year. The first Haitian artist to participate in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s residency program (in 1989–90), Gardère isn’t as well-known as he probably should be, if this booth is any indication. The works on view here, from 1996 to 2000, focus on what Gardère made following his 1993 residency at the Fondation Claude Monet in Giverny, France. The experience marked a turning point in Gardère’s career: He began working in a mode that played up the assemblage-like qualities of his work and used different framing devices. Among the most striking works here is Voyage to Ile de France (2000), which is divided horizontally into two sections. The black-painted top half shows a radiating masked figure illuminating a depiction of densely built housing in Haiti; just below is a small self-portrait (framed and affixed to the wood base) in which Gardère carries a suitcase. Faintly connecting the two sections is a snakelike path, showing the artist’s journey to the French countryside, represented in the work via a lush green landscape painting. Below that painting are various bric-a-brac—part of a watch, worn-down pencils, buttons, keys—along with paintings of a Gothic cathedral, a gargoyle, and Monet’s home. The work is a touching commentary on a Haitian artist’s journey to the country that colonized his homeland and how exactly that might impact his practice. - Phuong Nguyen at Tian Contemporain Phoung Nguyen works in a similar vein to Gardère, producing stunning assemblages. In these small works she mixes painting with ceramics and other materials, Western and Eastern art traditions. Planche CXXI v2 (2025), for example, is a still life showing chinoiserie and a yellow plastic basket on a velvet red fabric; inexplicably, several disembodied hands appear throughout the composition, holding either fans or strings of burning incense. The painting is suspended over pink twine that connects it to a wooden frame, where the artist has placed various ceramic floral motifs. - Conner O’Leary and Barry Elkanick at Martha’s This kooky twofer spotlights Conner O’Leary and Barry Elkanick, both of whom are self-taught. Gallery artist O’Leary introduced Martha’s founders Ricky Morales and Meredith Williams to Elkanick, whom he knew from the punk scene in Houston. They decided to mount a two-person show for the artists this past summer; a version of it has been brought to the Armory Show. O’Leary has on view a suite of paintings that are framed inside wooden chairs and hang on the booth’s walls. The cleverest of these is Shift Altar (2026), a mise en abyme in which the painting shows a modernist chair with an extremely long, bent nail on its seat; the wooden chair that acts as the canvas’s frame has several ceramic nails placed on its seat. On one wall, Elkanick has four Surrealism-inspired paintings that hang above a shelf displaying various found items he’s collected over the years, like a statue of a man with a pail, a wood carving of a watermelon, and a bird. (These objects aren’t technically for sale, but the gallery said it could be, depending on if someone is interested in them.) Nearby is a green abstraction that hangs right above a long-handled farming tool and a beguiling painting of a scarecrow. - Chantaléa Commin at Tout-Monde Art Foundation In the Focus section, which highlights the works of Caribbean artists this year, is this exciting booth by the Tout-Monde Art Foundation, an itinerant nonprofit supporting Caribbean artists. On view are works by two French Caribbean artists Eymric Moderne (from Martinique) and Chantaléa Commin (from Guadeloupe), who both look at the syncretism of the region in different ways. Moderne looks at the flora now found in Martinique in works on paper and sculptures. Born in Guadeloupe, to which she returned about 15 years ago after living for 25 years in Paris, where she moved to study art, Commin offers a much denser view of the ways in which this syncretism plays out in daily life in Guadeloupe. Babel
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