The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: The Armory Show

Like most large fairs, the Armory Show has more than its fair share of filler. The works that rise to the top have a precision of craft or style (or both) that makes them feel like the only adults in the room. Galleries that go all in on one artist seem to collect on their wagers.

Here’s the Good, the Bad and the Ugly from this year’s edition of the fair.

The Good: Vielmetter Los Angeles’s booth, decked from floor to ceiling with Karl Haendel’s photorealistic black-and-white drawings, offers one of the best reflections of contemporary culture beyond the artworld. It obliquely suggests that our quotidian images and symbols control us more than we care to admit. Suffused with a dark, poised humour, the drawings lionise Diet Coke: one depicts a Venn diagram casting it as a point of unity between Donald Trump and Karl Lagerfeld.

Photo: Courtesy of Dawn Blackman

Mennour’s nine photorealistic oil paintings by Algerian artist Dhewadi Hadjab – precise depictions of a figure in motion, draped in pink fabric – net another win. Collectors seem to agree: according to the fair’s closing report, eight sold for $110,000 each.

New York’s beloved Gratin Gallery goes in the opposite direction with similarly successful results, showing 13 artists. Standouts include Seung Ah Paik’s ‘autolandscapes’, which depict her own body, and the late John Kacere’s smallscale oil-on-canvas portraits of asses. Kacere’s paintings inspired the opening shot of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation(2003).

A few other works push through the noise. I love Ryan Bock’s monumental chess set Ode to Duchamp; a Liar (2022), shown jointly by Ki Smith Gallery and Blumka Contemporary and made entirely from antique piano parts salvaged from a defunct factory in the Bronx. And for a work that stops you cold, look to Willie Cole’s woodcut Birth of the Blues (2025), shown by the nonprofit Brandywine Workshop and Archives. Depicting enslaved Africans with yokes around their necks in the form of guitars, it connects an instrument of subjugation with one of resistance.

Honourable Mention: Radenko Milak’s film-noirish architectural watercolours, shown by Brandt Gallery, and David Smalling’s Balthus-bait oil-on-canvas still lifes, shown by Templon.

Watercolour on paper. Courtesy: Brandt Gallery.

The Bad: As at most fairs of the past decade, there are far too many goofy, faux-naive works that look as though they were finished in one particularly busy afternoon. Colourful, childlike offerings with zero sophistication and even less erotic potential have all but come to define what contemporary art looks like in 2026, and it’s a tyranny that should be resisted.

There are exceptions. Puerto Rican artist Joshua Nazario is self-taught, works at the margins of this style and actually produces art that feels relevant. Shown by San Juan-based gallery Embajada in the fair’s Focus section – curated by María Elena Ortiz and highlighting artists of Caribbean descent – his figurative acrylic-on-canvas works recall the intuitive, gestural approach of Henry Taylor. They convey a genuine feeling of joy and community often absent from less successful offerings.

Another work that rewards closer attention is Remy Jungerman’s Flying Geese (2026). Presented by Fridman Gallery in the fair’s Platform section, curated by Jovanna Venegas to highlight artists from the Caribbean diaspora, the largescale sculpture is a shrine to the artist’s Surinamese Maroon ancestors. Its triangular motifs echo the quilt patterns of the American South, connecting those ancestors to what the fair’s accompanying text describes as ‘the collective history, memory, and spirituality of the African diaspora’.

Wood, cotton textile, kaolin clay, tar, and glass beads. Courtesy: Fridman Gallery.

Honourable Mention: Regularnormal presents La Carta (2026), an irreverent, life-sized bed sculpture by Bony Ramirez, a Dominican-born, self-taught American painter and former construction worker from New Jersey. I would like to see it go head to head (bed to bed?) with Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998).

The Ugly: In a word: the Javits Center. It is a dismal place, in a cold, inhuman part of Manhattan. (I wish Le Corbusier could time-travel and see how brutally ugly things would really get in the twenty-first century.) The visiting experience, if one can call it that, gives pause for reflection. What are art fairs for? To pack as much stuff into as large a space as possible and sell it quickly?

Courtesy: The Javits Center

In ‘That Telltale Tingle’, a short story published in the March 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine, the American writer, filmmaker and contemporary artist Andrew Norman Wilson satirises fairs, specifically those held at the Javits Center. The protagonist drafts a proposal for a collective site-specific work for a Javits-based art fair, noting:

‘The three of us aren’t known as art-fair artists because we don’t have to make work for the wealth-management schemes of the One Percent, namely disguising financial assets as invaluable cultural expressions or interior decor. We don’t have to play that game because Dre’s great-great-grandfather, originally a meat-packer, decided to turn pig skin into pigskin and, well, we live off those schemes.’

It’s not bad advice. If fairs are going to be so nakedly transactional and unromantic – and if so many sales are done over email well before the fair opens – how long before they simply become online events, sponsored by Polymarket?

Smaller, more deliberately curated fairs in spaces that feel exciting to walk into offer a roadmap for a community-based model that is actually worth attending in person. Esther, which held its final edition in its current form at New York’s Estonian House in May, showed how it could be done. Leave Javits to Comic Con and the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Honourable Mention: The greige, modular Starbucks that greets visitors entering the Javits Center, setting expectations with burnt, undrinkable coffee and a vibe even more depressing than an airport coffee hole.