The 20 Best Booths at The Armory Show

Navigating The Armory Show’s two long piers, spanning 208,000 square feet and showcasing 205 exhibitors (no wonder your feet hurt, right?), can be a dizzying process. Below, we’ve pounded the pavement for you, parsing out the 20 booths—from established galleries like London’s Victoria Miro to risk-taking newcomers like Brazil’s SIM Galeria—that you shouldn’t miss on your tour around the fair’s 2016 edition.

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Pier 94 - Armory Presents, Booth 774

With works by David Scanavino

Why You Should Stop

What from afar looks like a colossal game of Candy Crush or technicolored Tetris, up close is an arresting, immersive meditation on color from Brooklyn-based David Scanavino. While the highly saturated polygonal wall works are enticingly textural, complete with finger impressions, it’s the floor piece, and its towering protrusions, that shouldn’t be missed, and resembles a Donald Judd sculpture and Chinatown linoleum become one. 

Galerie Nordenhake

Pier 94, Booth 801

With works by John Coplans

Why You Should Stop

This elegant installation is also one of the most moving and, at times, gut-wrenching presentations at the Armory. Across the booth, large-scale black-and-white photographs of an aging male body, cropped to focus on different areas, double as a gripping icons for the passage of time and the process of decay. The work on view represents the late John Coplans’s own body—and his most significant  body of work. He is better known as an art critic and co-founder of Artforum. 

GRIMM

Pier 94, Booth 721

With works by Nick van Woert, Charles Avery, Dustin Yellin, Volker Hüller, Dave McDermott, Dana Lixenberg 

Why You Should Stop

Covering the walls of a fair booth in brown fabric is a risky choice for a gallery, but GRIMM certainly makes it work, setting itself apart from its high-gloss neighbors. The sort of lively, wonder-inducing works that the Amsterdam gallery deals in jut from every corner of the warm, intimate booth. Dustin Yellin’s glass tableaus are crowd favorites, but the equally compelling works by Charles Avery and Nick van Woert shouldn’t be missed.

SIM Galeria

Pier 94, Booth 745

With works by Delson Uchôa

Why You Should Stop

Walk by Brazil’s SIM Galeria, and director Guilherme Simões de Assis will, quite literally, invite you into a painting—Pintura Habitada or Inhabited Painting (2016, priced at $450,000), which might one day be considered a masterwork by Brazilian artist Delson Uchôa. A square structure that fills the entire booth, it’s strung up with acrylic and resin panels that surround the viewer with semi-transparent grids. It turns out, as Simões de Assis explains, that each panel is meant to be interacted with, pulled to discover new layers or create revised environments. It might feel like the fort of your dreams, but it’s also intimately tied with the rich history of Brazilian Neo-Concrete art, which saw the fusion of art and life as one of its guiding principles.

Repetto Gallery

Pier 92, Booth 222

With works by Enrico Castellani, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Lucio Fontana, Luigi Ghirri, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Fausto Melotti, Mark Tobey, Gerhard Richter, Alberto Burri, Getulio Alviani, Agostino Bonalumi, Sadamasa Motonaga, Bruno Munari, Giulio Paolini, Tancredi, Carol Rama, Daniele De Lonti, Nanda Vigo, Jorge Eielson, Antonio Biasiucci

Why You Should Stop

At Repetto, works by two of Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera’s most illustrious students stand out. Made in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, Fausto Melotti’s charmingly quirky tabletop sculptures are highlights, along with a host of fantastic, smaller-scale works by Lucio Fontana, including two of his lesser-known sculptures.

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

Pier 94, Booth 844

With works by Shih Chieh Huang

Why You Should Stop

Housed in one of the fair’s few black-box booths, Shih Chieh Huang’s fantastical installation—in which an octopus-like creature, crafted from whirring and blinking electronics, kryptonite-colored goo, and plastic bags, waves comically—and sometimes suggestively. It’s an installation that poignantly confuses the wonder inspired by mysterious creatures and deep space with the mesmerizing effects of technology. 

Victoria Miro

Pier 94, Booth 600

With works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Hernan Bas, Stan Douglas, Chantal Joffe, Isaac Julien, Idris Khan, John Kørner, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, Grayson Perry, Tal R, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker

Why You Should Stop

One gets the sense that the monumental paintings, by the likes of Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, and Wangechi Mutu, that line the walls of Victoria Miro’s stunning booth are headed for major collections or museums. The smaller pieces—like Alice Neel’s excellent Abdul Rahman (1964)—pack a punch, too.

Daniel Faria Gallery

Pier 94 - Armory Presents, Booth 787

With works by Douglas Coupland

Why You Should Stop

This small, bold booth surfaces the recent work of artist and cultural theorist Douglas Coupland. A suite of mixed-media panels challenges Facebook’s facial recognition software by shrouding subjects’ identities with barcodes that resemble Mondrian paintings. The cohort of paint-splattered globes, propped on stands, also carries a deeper message. On each, the toxic latex paint was poured over the coordinates representing the location of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of non-biodegradable debris that floats in the Pacific Ocean and measures around 7.7 million square miles. 

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Pier 94, Booth 852

With works by Ruby Sky Stiler, Alexander Tovborg, Louise Despont

Why You Should Stop

After her Armory debut in the emerging “Presents” section in 2015, Lower East Side fixture Nicelle Beauchene moves to the fair’s main floor this year. She brings with her the tightly curated approach of her 13-artist program, by elegantly pairing three of her roster’s young practitioners. New York-based Ruby Sky Stiler forges sculptures and mosaics in which Amazonian female figures become one with ancient patterns and symbols, while Copenhagen and Berlin-based Alexander Tovborg’s saturated, symbol-laden paintings draw from folk art and mysticism.

Tiwani Contemporary

Pier 94 - Focus, Booth 548

With works by Francisco Vidal

Why You Should Stop

Coming off of his 2015 Venice Biennale inclusion, in which he represented Angola, Francisco Vidal papers Tiwani Contemporary’s booth with the output of a contraption he calls the “U.topia Machine,” a box that doubles as a portable screen-printing toolkit. The colorful prints are pieced together like a tapestry across the walls, their corners fluttering with the movements of fairgoers.

Galería OMR

Pier 94, Booth 505

With works by Keith Sonnier, Jose Dávila, Jorge Méndez Blake, Gabriel de la Mora, Ryan Brown, Theo Michael, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Héctor García

Why You Should Stop

OMR rejoins the Armory’s ranks this year, after a roughly 10-year hiatus from the fair, with a group of works that loosely reflect the creative exchange between New York and Mexico City, where the gallery is based. Jose Dávila’s monumental arrangement of tenuously balanced rocks, concrete, glass, and ratchet straps takes center stage, while quieter works by Jorge Méndez Blake and Gabriel de la Mora also shouldn’t be missed. 

Two Palms

Pier 94, Booth 733

With works by Cecily Brown

Why You Should Stop

Two Palms presents a suite of masterful watercolor and pastel monotypes from Cecily Brown (priced at $66,000 each). They draw inspiration from 16th-century Flemish master Jan Brueghel and his lush scenes depicting Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, or Noah’s Ark. Arranged evenly across the booth, the pastel-toned works, full of gestural, intertwining flora and fauna, tell a story of not only lost paradise, but Brown’s signature painterly language.

DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM

Pier 94 - Armory Presents, Booth 778

With works by Julian Charrière

Why You Should Stop

Berlin-based DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM’s back-corner booth doesn’t inhibit it from being one of the most conspicuous at the fair, thanks to Julian Charrière’s mesmerizing alchemical experiments. Here, remnants of the young Swiss artist’s recent penchant for melting devices like iPhones and hard drives in vats of molten lava take the form of geode-like rocks (priced between $8,500–$19,000). The strongest are placed on spotlit pedestals throughout the booth, while others are sliced, polished, and affixed to the walls—they resemble some sort of future game trophy, the result of a sportive type’s hunt for technological fossils.

Galerie Guido W. Baudach

Pier 94, Booth 740

With works by Yves Scherer

Why You Should Stop

The hot pink floor draws you in first, and Yves Scherer’s uncanny sculptures and wall works encourage you to stay. The Swiss artist, who is now based in New York and Berlin, mines celebrity and social media culture—and comes out with works that poke fun at contemporary fantasy. The pieces on view at Baudach are no exception—a gold statue of a naked Emma Watson holds court next to an uncanny sculpture, tilted Merman (2015), in which a pair of legs slides into a fish tank that’s set on a fur rug. They’re both manifestations of an artist grappling with today’s obsession with luxury (one we just might be drowning in).

Fleisher/Ollman

Pier 92, Booth 228

With works by Jim Nutt, Ray Yoshida, Christina Ramberg, Roger Brown, Karl Wirsum, James Castle, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, Bill Traylor, Philadelphia Wireman, Joseph Yoakum, Martín Ramírez, Art Green, Julian Martin, Gladys Nilsson

Why You Should Stop

Hailing from Philadelphia, Fleisher/Ollman brings museum-quality works by widely recognized outsider artists like Bill Traylor (his paintings are priced between $100,000–$200,000), along with lesser-known pieces by the likes of James Castle, whose tiny, hand-drawn books (priced between $15,000–$20,000) are not to be missed. 

Vigo Gallery

Pier 94 - Focus, Booth 631

With works by Ibrahim El Salahi

Why You Should Stop

This luminous booth boasts a mini-survey of 85-year-old Sudanese artist Ibrahim El Salahi’s storied body of work. Intimate 1960s drawings, which bear the marks of his itinerant early life between London and Sudan, join haunting 1980s ink-on-paper works made after his imprisonment by the Sudanese government in 1975. The masterwork of the booth is also the most recent. Across 121 inches, Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams III (2015) shows El Salahi at his best, expertly fusing a modernist visual language, African and Middle Eastern symbology, and the sinuous simplicity of calligraphy. 

Mayoral Galeria d’Art

Pier 92, Booth 402

With works by Joan Miró

Why You Should Stop

This whimsical installation recreates Spanish pioneer Joan Miró’s Mallorca studio—except here, on Pier 92, each painting propped on an easel is for sale. Also on view is a host of transportive ephemera, from photos and archival footage of the artist to his paint brushes and personal treasures, making this booth an enticing cabinet of curiosities. 

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

Pier 94 - Focus, Booth 532

With works by ruby onyinyechi amanze

Why You Should Stop

Mariane Ibrahim highlights Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based ruby onyinyechi amanze’s detailed drawings, embedded with collaged elements (and priced between $4,000–$18,500). The artist’s charged visual language—rooted in an exploration of identity and geography, two concepts she considers fluid—includes figures with the head of a tiger and the body of a woman, or others whose faces are obscured by astronaut’s helmets, as they float, untethered, in space. 

Koenig & Clinton

Pier 94, Booth 736

With works by Norbert Bisky, Albert Herter

Why You Should Stop

In a landscape where big, brash sculptures anchor many a fair booth, Koenig & Clinton’s installation of works on paper by Norbert Bisky and Albert Herter is a welcome reprieve. Brooklyn-based Herter’s detailed ink drawings (priced between $1,700–$3,000) show fantastical characters in the throes of confrontation (titles include Accusal, 2015, and Aggressive Constellation #5, 2015), while Bisky’s watercolors of nude or swim trunk-sporting men (priced between $3,000–$9,700), floating in on a pure white backdrop or playing chicken in crystal blue water, are some of the most lyrical pieces at the fair. It’s not surprising to learn that MoMA bought 14 works by the artist several years ago.  

Vilma Gold

Pier 94, Booth 520

With works by Oliver Osborne, Julia Wachtel