Five Standout Booths at The Armory Show 2025

9/4/2025

Hector Chen

As the Armory Show in New York opens its doors this week, the global art world’s spotlight falls once again on the fair booth. A booth is not just square footage filled with art—it is part stage, part shop, part curatorial statement. Some galleries treat it as a salesroom, others as a miniature exhibition, and the best manage to be both.

In looking at the presentations, I relied on a few key criteria: coherence of curatorial concept, the significance and freshness of the artists on view, the design and presentation of the space, and the boldness of the choices—whether in spotlighting overlooked voices, staging solo shows, or taking risks with non-commercial work.

These five booths exemplify what I found most compelling at this year’s fair.

Galerie La Forest Divonne (France)
Vincent Bioulès was staged with rare clarity: historical works anchoring the front, recent canvases pulling us deeper in. The layout became a story of persistence and renewal. His organic shapes and luminous colors, touched by Matisse, resist easy classification. A co-founder of Support/Surface who later embraced figuration, Bioulès has always defied confinement. This booth felt like a distilled retrospective, a meditation on freedom itself.

Ting Ting Art Space (Taiwan)
This booth unfolded in two halves: the left devoted to Yi Xiu Cai’s revival of traditional Chinese lacquer, shimmering with patience and ritual; the right to Katharina Arndt and Moisés Yagües, whose satiric Western-inflected works pricked consumer culture with wit. The juxtaposition of discipline and provocation created a resonance greater than either side alone. It was Taiwan’s voice on an international stage—rooted, restless, and dynamic.

kó (Nigeria)
Victoria-Idongesit Udondian’s After the Last Supper transformed porcelain into a vessel for postcolonial memory. Blue-and-white Ming patterns resurfaced on busts modeled after Ife heads and Benin bronzes, creating a startling blend of Kerry James Marshall’s silhouette with Chinese decorative tradition. Plates and textiles folded together fragments from Jingdezhen with African histories, offering a sharp metaphor for globalization. kó’s Lagos-based presentation was as seductive as it was critical: art alive with entanglement.

A Lighthouse called Kanata (Japan)
Kanata bravely brought 25 works by 25 artists, a strategy that might have risked incoherence but instead revealed a unifying thread—line and flow, organic forms, precision in motion. The booth hummed with variety yet never fractured. Yoko Togashi’s Bloom Softly 4-25 (seen above), a pink kiln-washed glass sculpture hovering between solidity and breath, captured the gallery’s ethos perfectly: material discipline reimagined as lyrical presence. Sales seemed brisk, confirming the risks had paid off.

Catharine Clark Gallery (United States)
Marie Watt’s solo presentation was a study in shared materiality. Blankets, steel, and tin jingles became vessels of story and ritual, rooted in Indigenous traditions but expansive in meaning. The textiles drew me in first—their clarity recalling Mondrian, their solemnity Barnett Newman—yet the closer I looked, the more the beaded texts blurred and sharpened, demanding patience. From towers to jingle sculptures, Watt showed how everyday objects can telegraph memory across cultures and generations

These five booths reflect the diversity, ambition, and energy that keep art fairs vital. The Armory Show is open at the Javits Center until Sunday.