Sales Report: The 2026 Armory Show Puts Emerging Galleries in Focus
The Armory Show opened its 32nd edition yesterday (Sept. 24) at the Javits Center, somewhat later than is typical. The fair was historically New York’s main art event and a leading force in shaping the country’s culture and market, but it has since undergone multiple changes in location, branding and leadership and has arguably lost some of its splendor. What its role actually is today in an increasingly crowded global fair calendar is up in the air; after being folded into the Frieze portfolio, it still lacks the brand power of the major New York art events in May. Speaking to Observer, art economist Magnus Resch likened the Armory Show to Soho House: “It has strong brand, a convenient location, kind hosts and organizers, and something for everyone—but it’s lost its cool, and it’s no longer clear what it stands for.”
“I think we’re an essential North American fair,” Armory Show director Kyla McMillan told Observer, adding that the fair still carries significant cultural cachet in the city. “It is incredible. I will run into people from other industries who know of the fair.” The question is whether there are enough people in New York who not only know of the fair but are ready to buy, given the Armory Show’s expansive roster of 242 galleries. Pushing the fair later into September doesn’t seem to have created enough momentum to attract collectors from abroad, or even from other states—part of a broader trend, according to advisor Adam Green: “I think the bigger reason is collectors are acquiring less overall than they were in the past, and therefore there is less urgency to attend as many fairs. If you aren’t sure you’re going to acquire a work, let alone multiple works, from a fair, you don’t feel as strong of a need to attend.”
Most of the advisors Observer asked for comment declined to speak about the Armory Show, preferring to comment instead on Independent’s inaugural edition at the Breuer, which opened the same day. Dealers, meanwhile, went from hoping more people would arrive in the afternoon to pinning their hopes on the weekend, given the first day’s relatively slow pacing. Most of the big gallery openings took place earlier in the month across Chelsea and Tribeca, and many of the bigger galleries were missing from the fair, leaving room for younger and middle-tier players to shine.
“I think we have a real opportunity to provide a broad view of what’s happening today. That is both a privilege and a real responsibility,” McMillan said. To that end, Present, the section dedicated to galleries 12 years old or younger, has expanded to 55 galleries, with almost half presenting solo booths. This made it the most navigable section of the fair; it felt almost like its own event dedicated to promising emerging artists, which might actually have made for a better fair. More accessible price points were likely behind the strong early sales reported by dealers.
Alexander Berggruen is showing the whimsical wooden sculptures of Mexican-born, Queens-based artist (and Silver Arts Project alum) Raul De Lara, just weeks after the artist unveiled his window installation at Hermès Madison Maison and opened a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin. His anthropomorphic plants and botanical forms that become furniture hint at a reenchantment of the mundane, while serving as metaphors for his own experience of in-betweenness as someone who immigrated to the U.S. and lived without documentation for approximately eight years before entering the DACA program. One highlight is Mis Flores / My Flowers, in which five potted flowers, each rendered in a different-colored wood, suggest the possibility of adapting and flourishing in new environments, even after being transplanted. Presented alongside the raw intuition of Madeline Peckenpaugh’s fluidly organic abstract stratifications, the gallery placed most of the available sculptures early in the fair. The Hermès window apparently generated multiple requests for commissions and works ahead of the fair.
Also in Present, Rajiv Menon makes its Armory Show debut with a now sold-out solo booth of paintings by Indian artist Raghav Babbar, with prices ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. The presentation coincides with his solo exhibition at the gallery’s L.A. space, which is also almost sold out. Shaped by Babbar’s experience of the Maha Kumbh, the Hindu pilgrimage in North India that in 2025 brought together more than 600 million people, the new works capture the ritual’s energy and the power of the collective. His masterful use of light allows figures to emerge almost epically as dramatic beams hit the scene like epiphanies. “It’s been thrilling to see Raghav’s work receive such a strong reception at the fair,” the dealer told Observer. “The overwhelming response to the work signals the artist’s status as one of the most important India-born Gen Z painters working today, and we are so proud to debut his work in the U.S.” Babbar’s work is in the permanent collections of several institutions worldwide, including the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, K11 Hong Kong, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice and the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum/Indigo Art Museum.
Nearby, KATES-FERRI PROJECTS had just one painting left by the afternoon from its colorful booth dedicated to a solo presentation of Salvadoran artist Studio Lenca, with works priced between $10,000 and $40,000. The artist recently opened an extensive solo exhibition at LagoAlgo in Mexico City, which helped fuel sales and enthusiasm. Shaped by migration, displacement, longing and the desire to re-establish a sense of belonging, Studio Lenca’s work has been in demand among collectors for some time, particularly his more iconic, highly stylized, often monumental figures.
Superposition Gallery was awarded the inaugural Bronx Museum Acquisition Prize for a work by Zoë Pulley priced at $14,000, which will enter the museum’s permanent collection. Montreal gallery Pangée sold the majority of works from its solo presentation of Russell Banx’s existentialist black-and-white drawings, all priced between $5,000 and $16,000. And Hannah Traore Gallery sold out its entire booth of subtly abstract self-portraits, body traces and embodied movements by Ghanaian-British artist Kesewa Aboah, with works priced between $2,500 and $27,000.
JOHS’s presentation in the section is more ambitious, centered on a diorama-like painted circle by Norwegian artist Morten Slettemeås. Seven panels, corresponding to the seven days of the week, combine different memorial and imaginative fragments of a landscape in transition, held together by the same horizon and emotional line. On day one, the gallery was holding off on individual sales in the hope of placing the work as a complete installation.
Margot Samel, another rising gallerist, is this year’s recipient of the Gramercy International Prize. Her booth centers on a conversation between the inventive little-house assemblages of Leroy Johnson (1937-2022) and the psychologically charged paintings of Sasha Brodsky. What connects the two artists’ work is a continuous process of layering: in Johnson’s case, through found materials sourced during daily walks; in Brodsky’s, through pastel traced onto raw linen. Both explore an interconnection and blending between figures and architecture, highlighting the porous dimension that characterizes urban existence, where the inner world is continually shaped by the noise, pressures and socioeconomic dynamics of the city. With prices ranging from around $18,000 to $22,000 for Johnson and all under $20,000 for Brodsky, the gallery reported interest and early placements for both artists by end of the day.
New Child from Antwerp sold out its solo presentation of Andrew Sendor, an artist whose consistently high demand and limited output further fuel collectors’ appetite. Marking his first solo presentation in New York since his 2017 exhibition, the booth introduces a new body of paintings, including large-scale works that represent a significant development within his practice, expanding in new directions the meticulous precision and psychological intensity for which he is widely recognized.
Other young galleries found their place in the curated sections instead. Rebekah Chozick, former senior director at Rachel Uffner, attracted attention with her new gallery, Chozick Family Art Gallery, presenting, as part of the Focus section, a solo booth of natural-pigment constellations by Puerto Rican artist Sofía Del Mar Collins ahead of her October solo exhibition at the gallery. Collins’s process is pure alchemy applied to natural rhythms: extracting botanical pigments from the landscape and blending flowers and compost to hand-dye silk before painting, she approaches each work as a site for the fluid transformation of matter and energy in perpetual becoming, as suggested by natural rhythms and organic transformations. Prices range from $4,000 for her highly intuitive plein air drawings to $30,000 for the more elaborate canvases; the gallery sold one of the larger works for $20,000.
Curated by María Elena Ortiz from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, this year’s Focus section gathers a series of practices that spotlight both the diversity of expression and the symbolic richness and timeliness of different Caribbean cultures. “We’re really expanding the idea of what Caribbean art is,” explained McMillan. “A lot of times, when we look at Caribbean art, we think just about the French-colonized islands or the Dutch, Spanish or British ones. But to have the full spectrum represented together, you see what connects the cultures more than what separates them.”
At the section’s center, a precarious structure resembling a rural shrine by Manuel Mathieu creates an entire synesthetic environment exploring scent as a material of the invisible. A small vessel diffuses a perfume that invites visitors to gather around a presence felt rather than seen. Evoking spiritual rituals in which fragrance sanctifies space and invokes the unseen, Shrine transforms scent into a medium of connection, both intimate and collective, carrying the immaterial force of memory.
Nearby, Patron from Chicago is presenting a solo booth by Jamaican-born artist Simon Benjamin, continuing his exploration of the relationship between the Caribbean and trade, ocean travel, import-driven consumerism, tourism and other neocolonial relationships imposed by the United States and the West. Anchoring the entire booth is a freestanding wooden armature modeled after traditional Caribbean fish pots, or “fish traps.” From it, Benjamin suspends some of his archival image-derived paintings and geological core samples, while a two-channel video emerges from a glass-covered section of the floor. Within this multilayered, mixed-media constellation of interconnected yet fluid histories, Benjamin considers the past, present and future, as well as the poetic symbolism of the sea. Notably, the artist was selected for the second edition of the Delfina Foundation Artist Residency Prize; the gallery had placed seven works by the afternoon, with prices ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.
Collaborating spaces Hydrante and Momi have staged a dialogue between the emotional and physical processes of layering and stratification shared by Ricardo Cabret’s digitally generated and painterly, tactually translated impossible spaces and Ernesto Rivera’s more sentimental effort to map and trace meaning amid the chaotic nature of existence, between grief and a desire for reconciliation within creation.
Cologne-based Jamaican artist Theresa Weber, presented by London-based Studio Chapple, plays with layering too, but through a more intuitive exercise in mapping and recombination that charts a personal dimension within complex histories. Linking to her own performances as well as the broader history of indigo and trade, her works feature an intuitive recombination of clay fragments as they take on new configurations between archival trade routes and newly imagined paths. Prices range from $6,000 to $22,000; one of the more ritualistic-looking sculptures, Woven Body Blue, was acquired by Pérez Art Museum Miami as part of the Armory Show’s acquisition prize.
Next door, Magenta Plains is spotlighting the work of French-Haitian Paul Gardère, a long-overlooked historical figure in the Caribbean art and cultural scene who has recently been brought back into focus. As a member of the Haitian diaspora in France, he brings together cultural fragments from different places on wooden boards, recombining them through a syncretic form of storytelling that reflects the layered histories and identities of the Caribbean. Multilayered references to Haitian Vodou and Gardère’s personal reimagining of Impressionist scenes blend into a new syncretism of symbols that reflects the richness of Haitian identity, where Catholicism and Vodou coexist within a single visual field. Prices here range between $32,000 and $74,000 following recent institutional and curatorial recognition of his work, which most recently entered the collections of the Phillips Collection, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions.
Last year’s exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami helped raise the visibility of Elliot and Erick Jiménez’s work, with several pieces from What We Are Becoming selling on day one in the $10,000-20,000 range. Continuing their exploration of the syncretism that has shaped much of Caribbean identity, the two Cuban-born brothers repurpose found artifacts and symbols, giving visual form to the fluid hybridity through which communities have sought to preserve their own habits and rituals amid religious imposition and cultural erasure. Their figures, with facial features intentionally dissolving into darkness, become fluid, universal deities able to evoke a more archetypal spiritual presence and a desire for connection with the transcendental shared across cultures.
Not all of the veteran galleries have eschewed the fair. Perrotin, for example, has returned to the Armory Show after an eight-year hiatus with a solo presentation by French-Haitian artist Kathia St. Hilaire. Her work explores Haitian folklore and mythology, and the presentation focuses on the symbolic and spiritual heritage left by the Spiralism movement. By the first evening, the gallery had sold six works priced between $5,000 and $45,000. Marian Goodman mounted a show of works by Tavares Strachan in a presentation tied to the fair’s Caribbean focus. The artist approaches the region not as a fixed identity or singular history but as a place shaped by movement, exchange, improvisation, displacement and overlapping cultural traditions.
In the main section, the recently rebranded Norr Cohan gallery was selling, on day one, Yinka Shonibare works in the $180,000-220,000 range; Infinite Regress CLXXXIII (Variation I) (2026) and Talking Shit With Amaru (Variation II) (2026) by Eamon Ore-Giron in the $80,000-120,000 range each; Color Notes (Winter) II (2019) by Spencer Finch in the $50,000-75,000 range; Pied-à-Terre (2026) and A Marriage Portrait: Fred and Laura (2026) by Alison Elizabeth Taylor in the $30,000-40,000 range each; and But Solitary Mountains Too by Jordan Nassar in the $20,000-30,000 range.
Also returning, São Paulo gallery Nara Roesler sold Sheila Hicks’s The soft side of my nature (2025) for $260,000, alongside works by Abraham Palatnik’s ($60,000), Marco A. Castillo ($50,000) and two works by Manoela Medeirospriced at $22,000 and $9,000 each.
Vielmetter Los Angeles reported 10 works sold, ranging from $2,500 to $48,000, while Mennour sold out its entire solo booth of works by Dhewadi Hadjab priced at $110,000 each. 303 Gallery sold two Rob Pruitt paintings for $155,000 each, a Doug Aitken lightbox for $150,000, three works by Jeppe Hein for €45,000, €40,000 and €28,000, a Tim Gardner watercolor for $20,000 and an Alicja Kwade wall work for $40,000.
CARVALHO, showing in the main section and also part of this year’s selection committee, has an elegant three-person show of delicate, materially driven works by French artist Élise Peroi, Rosalind Tallmadge and Anoushka Mirchandani. Early on, the gallery sold two works by Peroi for $30,000 and $18,000, two works by Rachel Mica Weiss for $29,000 and $22,000 and a work by Heath Wae for $14,500. The booth also included two new striking works by Anoushka Mirchandani, priced around $40,000, ahead of a planned exhibition at the gallery next year. “Being newly on the Selection Committee for the Armory Show, I’m particularly invested in this edition of the fair. It is always important to me that female voices are given a prominent place, which you see in our booth with our all-female presentation, and across the fair in some of the most exciting and considered presentations I’ve seen in years,” founder Jennifer Carvalho told Observer, pointing to a real sense of intention across the fair this year, with presentations that feel less concerned with commanding attention than with creating space for sustained encounters with artists’ practices.
Nearby, Jacob Arthur continues its successful formula of spotlighting Dan Life’s glittering, handmade pop, with masterfully crafted compositions that openly play with, and highlight, the free appropriation of cultural symbols that accompanies our society, often in a paradoxical way. Anchoring the booth is a red Yves Klein Victory, standing atop a gold-leaf-covered pedestal and in front of a gold wall. At the time of reporting, the gallery had placed a total of six works, with prices between $7,500 and $105,000 for the more elaborate composition Welcome to My Humble Abode No. 96, featuring a Simpsons clown looking at 21 reproductions of famous works by artists ranging from Van Gogh to George Condo, passing through Kusama and Banksy, all reduced to the flattening space of an interior-design magazine poster.
Also in the main section is Marc Straus, which reported the sale of 10 works ranging from $8,000 to $250,000, with the majority acquired by six museums. Sales included four of five chairs by Lucia Hierro, each priced at $85,000, three of which were acquired by museums. Making its debut in this section, London’s Gazelli Art House placed a large historic painting on canvas by Lilly Fenichel with a major private European museum in the $200,000 range. The Baku- and London-based gallery recently opened in New York, taking over the space once occupied by Marlborough.
Southern Guild has returned to the Armory Show for the first time since opening its permanent gallery in Tribeca five months ago, marking the gallery’s most comprehensive fair presentation in New York to date. A highlight of the booth is Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s nine-foot-wide monumental canvas Intifada XVI. Through the rhythmic repetition of brushstrokes, the composition evokes a multitude, at times resembling an army or a flock, suggesting a history written collectively through the accumulation of individual gestures of resistance or acquiescence. By 3 p.m., the gallery had placed a work by Adebayo Bolaji, priced at $28,000, alongside works by Roméo Mivekannin ($56,000), Zanele Muholi ($52,000) and Amine El Gotaibi ($34,000).
In one of the day’s highest sales, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery sold a painting by Joan Mitchell for more than $2 million to a private collection. The gallery also sold two oil, graphite and ink-on-paper works by Benny Andrews, each in the $50,000-100,000 range; a bronze work by Richmond Barthé in the $100,000-250,000 range; a collage by Louise Nevelson in the $100,000-250,000 range; and a mixed-media collage by Hannelore Baron in the $10,000-25,000 range.
Platform, the section focused on large-scale sculpture by voices from the Caribbean diaspora and curated by Jovanna Venegas, shows greater ambition. Dominican artist Bony Ramirez‘s multipart installation stands out among them, with an entire mythological narrative unfolding across the fair’s days: a little girl lies in bed holding a mysterious letter, confined behind chain curtains, with surreal paintings hanging from the chains that depict her racing thoughts just as a snake, an ominous presence or presage, advances toward the bed. A larger painting at the back of the canopy illustrates her path toward hope, representing the light she ultimately discovers at the end of the tunnel.
The installations dotting the aisles include work by Chinese, New York-based artist Shuyi Cao, who also has a prominent presence at Bank’s booth. Combining natural materials and technological artifacts, her hybrid sculptures appear like fossils from another age, or forms emerging from a posthuman future. Through her artistic process, Cao embraces the principle of entropy that governs the cosmos: materials, organic matter and artificial elements come together carrying different histories and origins, blending and colliding in fluid, eclectic ensembles. Two of the sculptures were on reserve by the evening. Following a similar relictal, archaeological aesthetic that merges the future and the ancestral past are Nicola Pottinger’s totemic hybrid sculptures, presented by Mrs., timed to coincide with her inclusion at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York.
Overall, the fair’s expansive, dispersed nature can make the sheer amount of work on view feel excessive, making it more difficult to maintain the level of attention needed to focus on the rising art scene that still nourishes much of its roster. Yet that emerging and mid-career ecosystem is also the part of the Armory Show that makes the strongest case for exhibiting—and for attending.
