10 Must-See Gallery Exhibitions during Armory Week 2024
Anthony Cudahy, Dowsing (studio), 2024. © Anthony Cudahy. Photo by GC Photography. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM.
With the dog days of summer behind us, the art world is reemerging and looking ahead to the fall season. In New York, the so-called Armory Week anchored by The Armory Show marks this return. The week brings with it additional fairs, including Independent 20th Century, Art on Paper, and the scrappy, artist-forward SPRING/BREAK.
Taking place the first week of September, this year’s Armory Week might not be as frenzied as 2023 (when PHOTOFAIRS was also on), but there will certainly be no shortage of art around the city. At the Javits Center, The Armory Show will feature over 235 exhibitors and present a packed schedule of programs. The fair has also partnered for the third time with the U.S. Open to showcase underrepresented artists on the tennis center’s grounds. This will include Eva Robarts’s sculpture Fantasy of Happiness (2022) made of repurposed tennis balls and a chain-link gate, presented by Ruttkowski;68.
Outside the fair walls, local galleries across the city are opening exhibitions of their own, including a strong selection of solo shows featuring some of the rising stars and seasoned veterans of contemporary art. From Monica Bonvicini’s feminist installations to Hilary Pecis’s vibrant Southern Californian landscapes, here are the 10 best gallery shows to add to your Armory Week agenda.
Hilary Pecis, Dining Room, 2024. Photo by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.
Hilary Pecis, Pepita, 2024. Photo by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.
In the colorful interior and exterior scenes in her new paintings in “Warm Rhythm,” rising star Hilary Pecis offers a glimpse into her life in Southern California. Pecis, who joined David Kordansky Gallery’s illustrious roster in 2021 after having worked there for five years as a registrar, creates vibrant paintings often featuring still lifes and domestic interiors. Rife with books, flowers, and the occasional personal item like a pill organizer, each work in “Warm Rhythm” has a subtle intimacy. Reimagining the Pattern and Decoration movement’s foregrounding of motifs and decorations with her distinctly SoCal style, Pecis portrays the striations of wooden window panes with equal consideration as she does the blooming camellias sitting on a table.
There is a distinct flatness and uniform saturation throughout these works, as Pecis creates depth in the positions of objects in space rather than through shadows or contour, adding an observational quality to each scene. In Dining Room (2024), for example, the abundant flower arrangement and vibrant floral tablecloth comprise this view of Pecis’s world as much as the fruiting tree seen just outside the window.
Elizabeth Radcliffe, Philly in Lacoste, 2024. Photo by Patrick Jameson. Courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel.
Elizabeth Radcliffe, Segura Leathers, 1979. Photo by Patrick Jameson. Courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel.
Elizabeth Radcliffe’s first solo show with emerging gallery Margot Samel brings together weavings from the 1970s to today, though one would be hard-pressed to recognize this temporal expanse. Indeed, the figurative body of work on view seems to have changed little in over 50 years, as have the sporty fashion choices of her subjects. Weaving with meticulous consideration, the 74-year-old Scottish artist depicts cropped images of jackets and shirts, homing in on just a corner of the wearers’ torsos and shoulders and taking care not to show their faces. While the subjects’ identities are of little consequence, their sartorial choices certainly are. In each, the style and brand are clearly shown, from the distinct alligator of a Lacoste polo to an Adidas windbreaker or the waxy exterior of a Belstaff motorcycle jacket.
Complementing these cropped torsos are portraits that feature entire silhouettes, including one of the late French artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz seated in a plush chair. In choosing weaving as a medium, Radcliffe joins the legacy of fiber artists blurring the boundaries between fine art and craft. Bringing together these two facets of Radcliffe’s practice, the show offers a rare introduction to the lesser-known artist’s career.
Anthony Cudahy, The Arsonist iii, 2024. © Anthony Cudahy. Photo by GC Photography. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM.
In concurrent shows at GRIMM and Hales Gallery, Anthony Cudahy continues his personal exploration of queer identity and intimacy in lush figurative paintings and works on paper. The artist is having a big moment in his career, with his first U.S. museum solo exhibition opening earlier this year at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine, traveling to the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas this October. Drawing from a number of sources, both personal to him and scoured from the internet, Cudahy captures the everyday complexities and emotions of queer life, from the sense of belonging and comfort shared between loved ones to the introspection of a quiet moment alone. Some subjects are from the artist’s life, while others pull from art history and film. In each work, Cudahy uses rich and unexpected hues like orange, magenta, and chartreuse, as if his figures are emitting an extraordinary glow, a sensation amplified by his often wet-on-wet application of paint.
For the two shows, Cudahy considers the idioms of fool’s gold and fool’s errand, likening the role of the artist to that of a fool. In this light, the “fool’s errand,” or the act of doing something with little hope of success, speaks to the art-making process itself. Meanwhile, the deceit of “fool’s gold” can be seen as a metaphor for the subjectivity of the artist’s expertly crafted output.
In luminous—at times ethereal—paintings of interior scenes and exterior spaces, French Caribbean artist Alexandre Lenoir explores the way in which we form and hold memories by grasping visual cues and filling in details lost over time. The young artist, whose work was featured in a 2022 group show “We Paint” at the Beaux Arts de Paris, mirrors this practice in his creative process, which he begins by projecting black-and-white and sepia-toned photographs onto a canvas. Lenoir then recreates these images with paint (both acrylic and oil) and with masking tape—an unconventional material that has become central to his work. As he adds paint and tape, sometimes removing the latter, taking with it bits of pigment, Lenoir builds layers that at times resemble old photographs whose colors have faded and become distorted over the years. With these visible, textured layers and clear evidence of materials having been added and stripped away, Lenoir imbues his work with a ghostly and elusive quality.
The artist’s process is meticulous and conceptual, carefully planned with graphs, charts, and written instructions for his studio assistants, hints of which sometimes remain on the finished pieces. In this light, Lenoir further parallels the often collaborative process of building and recalling memories, as well as our reliance on others to add context with their own recollections.
Ibrahim Mahama, Abena, 2024. © Ibrahim Mahama. Courtesy of White Cube.
For his first solo show in New York, “A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS” at White Cube, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama builds on his ongoing investigation of political and social issues in his home country. The artist, whose work has been featured in several museum shows and biennials worldwide, including at the Centre Pompidou, explores how industrial and everyday materials can speak to border issues of migration, capital, and economies of labor, such as jute sacks used to transport coal.
In charcoal drawings and a new installation, Mahama considers Ghana’s colonial-era railways, exploring the nation’s industrial decline and post-colonial collapse. For A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS (2024), the large-scale installation that lends its name to the exhibition, Mahama combines materials layered with significance, including items from the former railways, as well as from the Tamale Teaching Hospital, a declining facility marred by preventable and unexplained deaths. Encompassing the entire first floor of the gallery, the installation underscores the losses that came with economic and infrastructural failure in Ghana’s post-colonial era.
Joining this work is a series of large charcoal drawings in White Cube’s upstairs gallery that document a project Mahama undertook with Red Clay Studio in which he and his collaborators salvaged a train and parts of the railroad tracks. The drawings feature men carrying these items, as if the heavy burden of industrialism is weighing them down.
In “Dream House,” New York–based British painter Stephen Thorpe draws inspiration from Carl Jung’s concept of the same name, in which the home symbolizes the human psyche. In this theory, each room is seen as an extension of a different part of the mind—both the personal and the collective. Drawing inspiration from psychoanalysis, sociology, and symbolism, Thorpe blurs the lines between the real and the abstract, illustrating the tensions between the internal and external worlds.
Thorpe focuses on the corners of rooms, at times filling this narrow, intimate vantage point with vibrant imagery, such as landscapes and exotic birds. In Sacred Landscape of Inside Things (all works 2024), for example, the mid-career artist depicts a serene landscape with an expansive perspective. This forms a contrast with works like A Symbol of Solitude for the Imagination and A Place of Reasoning Between the Inside and the Outside, in which thick, expressive swathes of paint cover the walls, perhaps symbolic of the physical and psychological barriers we build around us.
For her first New York solo show, “milk and honey,” Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) brings together installation, ceramics, and collage, creating powerful works that evoke issues around education, social justice, ecology, and Indigenous feminism. A member of the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, Siestreem is inspired by ancestral traditions, such as beadwork, basketry, and weaving, which she reimagines in her practice. Siestreem’s work is in several prominent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Forge Project, the Native-led nonprofit that also awarded her a fellowship in 2022.
“milk and honey” features mixed-media paintings that draw from Indigenous traditions and the language of abstraction with geometric shapes and gestural paint drips. In some, Siestreem hints at recognizable imagery like hands and oyster shells. These shells are found in middens—piles of domestic materials like food and detritus that were created by Native communities for generations. Siestreem’s use of the oyster shell image serves as a reminder of the groups displaced by colonists. Coinciding with the show, Cristin Tierney Gallery will showcase Siestreem’s work at The Armory Show in a joint presentation with Elizabeth Leach Gallery.
Élise Lafontaine, The Sea’s Pulse, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Barrett.
Élise Lafontaine, When Silence Speaks, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Barrett.
“Les Vagues” is Élise Lafontaine’s debut exhibition in New York and with Jack Barrett. In it, the emerging Canadian artist considers the meaning of vague—both as the French word for “wave,” as well as something unclear, nebulous, or hard to grasp. Indeed, fluidity and movement are at the heart of the paintings on view, seen in undulating ribbons of yellow and orange flowing across the surface in The vein of the earth (all works 2024), and in pulsating, volumetric forms in works like When silence speaks.
Lafontaine draws from a number of sources in these works, including the Lombrives Cave and Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel in France and the Goetheanum in Switzerland. This research into caves and built environments like prisons and monasteries is common in Lafontaine’s practice, and earned her a solo presentation at the artist-run Centre CLARK in Montreal in 2023, as well as another earlier this year at Pangée, which represents her. At the same time, her shapes have subtle anthropomorphic qualities, as if abstracting the curves and cavities of a body. For some works, Lafontaine takes this feeling of shape and movement further, painting on canvases mounted to curved wood that seem to billow and ripple towards the viewer, blurring the line between painting and sculpture.
Monica Bonvicini, installation view of “Put All Heaven in a Rage” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Confronting the relationship between the viewer, the space of the gallery, and the materials themselves, Monica Bonvicini’s works in “Put All Heaven in a Rage” are provocative and humorous. A leading, drily humorous voice, the German Italian artist combines elements of sculpture and installation, taking on gender, power dynamics, and social norms through an unwavering feminist lens. She often uses reflective surfaces, involving the gallery’s architecture and the viewer in the work itself. Since emerging in the 1990s, Bonvicini’s work has been widely exhibited and celebrated, earning her the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999.
For this exhibition, Bonvicini has constructed a wooden frame resembling a house inside the space of the gallery, alluding to the duality of the human experience and the different norms of private and public life. These separate spheres are subverted in the show, as cheeky references to fetishes and sexual desire abound with chains, leather belts, and handcuffs comprising sculptures, including swings that visitors can interact with, and tongues sticking through holes cut out of colored mirrors.
In a new series of ceramic vessels in “OoNomathotholo/Ancestral Whispers,” artist, spiritual leader, and healer Andile Dyalvane connects with the land and experiences of his Xhosa ancestors. A leading ceramic artist in South Africa, Dyalvane’s work can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ongoing exhibition “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.”
For his solo show at Friedman Benda, Dyalvane created a new body of work during a period of loss, telling personal and collective stories through the materials and their forms. Walls of his vessels may sag and buckle, but remain resilient and strong, adorned with rich and vibrant colors. Some surfaces bear marks similar to traditional Xhosa scarification and resemble worn skin evoking the human stories of wisdom, loss, healing, and growth.
Dyalvane is inspired by the spirit of the constantly flowing and shifting natural world, both metaphorically and physically through his use of clay from the village of Ngobozana where he was born. Arranging the vessels in a circle around a central totem in the form of a ceremonial gathering, Dyalvane welcomes the viewer into his communal space to consider the storytelling and healing possible through craft.
Thumbnail: Hilary Pecis, “Sharon Flowers,” 2024. Photo by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery.
