APAA’s Top Picks From The Armory Show and Independent 20th Century
Works by Mia Chaplin presented by What If The World, Cape Town at The Armory Show 2025. Photo by Casey Kelbaugh Associates.
The fall art fair calendar continues with the eagerly anticipated Armory Show and Independent 20th Century. The Armory Show brings roughly 230 international galleries from over 30 countries to the Javits Center, with the VIP Preview taking place on September 24th. The Armory Show is open to the public from Friday, September 25, to Sunday, September 27th. Independent 20th Century is holding its 2026 edition at the Breuer Building, Sotheby’s new global headquarters. The VIP Preview takes place on Thursday, September 24, and the fair opens to the public on Friday, September 25th, until Sunday, September 27th.
APAA advisors have thoughtfully curated a selection of exceptional highlights from both fairs, reflecting the range of expertise that defines our community. Thank you to our members for sharing their curations and expertise.
Top Picks from The Armory Show
Lisu Vega, A Momentary Whole, 2025.
“Vega’s work is based on investigation of memory and I admire her ability to create inheritance these immersive architectural environments. Process and materiality are essential elements in her work. And in this particular monumental presentation is created from photographic transfers on handwoven rope residue, and features family photographs spanning Vega’s life from infancy through the present day.”
Photographic transfers on handwoven textiles made from repurposed rope
40 × 20 feet
Presented by Gladwell Projects
Jordan Ann Craig, The Boy Loved the Girl and the Girl Loved the Moon, 2026.
“I'm drawn to the paintings of Jordan Ann Craig (b. 1992), a Native American artist who incorporates the patterns of Cheyenne beadwork and weaving into hard-edged geometric abstraction, which dominated American art in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to have a long tail. Her intricate motifs and subtle color shifts are best perceived in person, particularly because her vivid colors create an optical effect on the retina. Craig received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and lives and works in New Mexico. Her work is included in prominent museum collections such as the Guggenheim Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, and the Speed Art Museum.”
Acrylic on canvas
70 x 70 x 2 1/2 inches
Presented by Hales Gallery
Willehad Eilers, Alle gegen Alle, 2026.
“This body of work seems to capture the inflection point we see and feel around us — affluence is the subject of Eilers paintings and the pressure speed and exhaustion of ‘fitter happier more productive’ is given painterly life here. As a German painter, he brings such a contemporary voice to the genealogy of paintings of the grotesque and social milieu. Think Jorg Immendorf’s Café Deutschland for the peptides set! Any collector with a sense of humor and love of bawdiness should snap this up!”
Oil on canvas
59 x 43.25 inches
Presented by Management
Raul De Lara, Soft Monstera, 2026.
“Raul De Lara’s Soft Monstera sits at a compelling intersection of contemporary sculpture, material intelligence, and autobiographical symbolism. De Lara's leaf, carved exquisitely from walnut, becomes a sculptural form that is simultaneously bodily, architectural, and psychologically charged. For De Lara, plants are not simply decorative motifs but figures of displacement and endurance: uprooted, contained, and yet capable of continued growth. That metaphor gives the work particular resonance within a contemporary art landscape attentive to migration, belonging, and the politics embedded in everyday forms.”
Walnut, polyx-wax
48 x 47 x 4 1/2 inches
Presented by Alexander Berggruen Gallery
Charlotte Edey, Fold above fold, a surging mase!, 2025.
“Charlotte Edey is a young British artist whose show I saw at James Cohan at the beginning of this year. I was impressed by the intricacy and immersive quality of her work, which incorporates pastel, embroidery, beadwork, woodworking, and stained glass. Her visual language is so unique in its ability to pull the viewer in and out of spatial and psychological architectures. I am particularly drawn here to the tension created through the juxtaposition of the organic palette and forms to the rigid grid structure. The complexity, texture, and dimension of her work can only be fully appreciated in person, so this is definitely a must-see at the fair!”
Soft pastel, glass beads, woven jacquard in sapele panel frame
88 5 /8 x 88 5/8 x 1 1/8 inches
Presented by Norr Cohan
Laura Grisi, Untitled, sd 1965-66.
“Laura Grisi (1939-2017) was a multidisciplinary artist who lived and worked primarily in Rome and New York. After exhibitions in 1965 in Rome and Milan, she was chosen to participate in the 1966 Venice Biennale, leading to an exhibition with Leo Castelli in New York City. As with many artists of her time, it's taken nearly 6 decades for the scholarship around Grisi's work to be examined and expanded, revealing an artist whose research and projects reveal affinities with Kinetic Art, Pop Art, American Minimal Art, and Arte Povera (she was included in the seminal 2024 Arte Povera exhibition at the Pinault Collection). She shaped an independent position for herself, whose nomadism is now the central focus of a rediscovery, also thanks to a series of recent international exhibitions -- heightened interest is evidenced by recent acquisitions of her works by prominent institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Tate Collection in London. These developments are contributing to a broader re-evaluation that positions Grisi as an important figure whose work transcends conventional art historical classifications. The Untitled work from the Armory presentation embodies a key element of Grisi's work from the 1960s, where the subject is already the painting within the painting, where multiplication and fracturing of space exist in the 2-D plane.”
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
39.37 x 39.37 inches
Presented by Galleria P420
Rajni Perera, Heritage Sports, 2026.
“Rajni Perera is a Sri Lankan artist who channels her frustration with the oppressive ideologies of our world into fantastical figures that counteract these forces and imagine new futures. While many of her forms appear rooted in traditional folklore of the past, their meaning is deeply contemporary, reflecting Perera’s vision for the future and exploring themes of femininity, migration, and globalization. This work also incorporates craft traditions, with sculptural clay and a string of sewn pearls adding dimensionality and tactile materiality to the surface.”
Acrylic gouache, polymer clay, glass pearls and freshwater pearls on polyester
60 x 84 inches
Presented by Nature Morte
Jasmine Little (1984-2026), Lordaeron Canals, 2025.
“Completed in the final year of Jasmine Little's practice, Lordaeron Canals exemplifies the artist's raw talent and rogue, inventive spirit. Measuring more than four feet tall, Little's columnar vessel is physically imposing yet inviting. It asks the viewer to navigate around a composition brimming with birds, bunnies, flowers, cherubs, and tiny demons playing peek-a-boo; its tall, central figure is turned upside down in an atemporal world located somewhere between antiquity and the present day. Little's sculpture and its adjacent storytelling resist easy categorization. In spite of needing to acknowledge the spatial confines of her chosen medium, one can sense Little's primal, creative force defying containment.”
Stoneware and glaze
52 x 12 x 13 inches
Presented by La Loma Projects
Clare Woods, Aged Varnish, 2025.
“Clare Woods’ Aged Varnish (2026), presented by Victoria Miro Gallery, is part of a focused presentation inspired by Manet’s dictum that a painter “can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers.”
Artist Clare Woods paints in oil on aluminium panels laid flat, pushing paint through paint and mixing colour directly on the surface - wet into wet, with no way back. In Aged
Varnish, the bouquet behaves less like a still life than a body: petals slump and pool, stems hold their line, and colour arrives bruised and beautiful at once. Rather than capturing flowers at their peak, Woods is interested in the full life cycle of the flowers. As the artist explains: “For me, the idea of a vase of flowers represents a life span, in a tiny little environment. You’ve got the youth of the buds and the flowers in full bloom, before they droop and discolour, and then the petals fall off, and they die. It’s the whole life cycle that I am interested in.”
Aged Varnish (2026) holds that whole cycle at once - beauty, abundance, decay, and disappearance.”
Oil on aluminium
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches | 100 x 100 cm
Presented by Victoria Miro Gallery
Top Picks From Independent 20th Century
Reginald Madison, Ohmm, 2024-2026
“As a self-taught artist, Reginald Madison's practice is informed by a variety of influences - from jazz to observations and his own lived experiences. And this specific work, Ohmm - a wall-mounted totem built from salvaged wood - beyond a striking visual assemblage, is also an homage to Sun Ra; its repeating cloaked forms read like an ascending chorus.”
Water-based paint, salvaged wood, Danish oil, hardware
90 x 57 inches
Presented by Uffner & Liu
Mary Grigoriadis, Giotto's Oranges, 1974.
“The presentation of Mary Grigoriadis's (b. 1942, New Jersey) paintings from the 1970s showcases a pivotal decade in Grigoriadis’s practice during which she developed her distinctive visual language of textured geometric forms juxtaposed with swaths of exposed raw linen. Giotto's Oranges exemplifies the artist's unique synthesis of decoration, geometry, and abstraction into a singular painterly vocabulary. A founding member of the all-female, artist-run cooperative gallery A.I.R. and a leading figure in the still under-recognized Pattern and Decoration movement, she challenged the hierarchies of modernist painting by embracing the decorative as a site of formal innovation and feminist expression. Grigoriadis was included in the With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art exhibition organized by MOCA, Los Angeles.”
Oil and acrylic on raw linen
66 x 66 inches
Presented by Ortuzar
Elaine de Kooning, Bacchus #80, 1983
“Independent 20th Century offers the opportunity to discover overlooked artists, or works and series by artists that you may not have encountered before. I’m loving Olney Gleason’s presentation of Elaine de Kooning’s Bacchus series, a body of work that transforms a classical Roman statue in Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg into a kaleidoscopic study of color, light, and energetic gesture. The series exemplifies the artist’s mastery of navigating the space between figuration and abstraction.”
Acrylic on canvas
84 x 66 inches
Presented by Olney Gleason
Arman, Pouring Vinyl, 1969.
“Coming from a remarkable moment in postwar art: a mid-to-late-1960s wave of artist-designed felt banners and editioned "multiples" that treated the artwork itself as a democratized, mass-producible object - the same conviction that led Marian Goodman to co-found Multiples, Inc. in 1965. Seeing Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Arman's editions together is a reminder that this was never a side note to Pop and Nouveau Réalisme - it was central to how these artists thought about accessibility, industry, and the very definition of the unique object.
Arman, a founding figure of Nouveau Réalisme, built his career on "accumulation" - everyday objects gathered, embedded, or encased en masse until the object itself becomes the subject. 1969 was a pivotal year for this idea in particular: it's the same year he made I Still Use Brushes, now in MoMA's collection, embedding paintbrushes directly into the picture plane. Pouring Vinyl continues that same interrogation of the artist's own tools, issued as a larger, more widely distributed edition - a reminder that Arman's accumulations weren't only unique studio statements, but were also, quite deliberately, produced as multiples for a broader audience, in step with exactly what Warhol and Lichtenstein were doing with their banners just a few years earlier.”
79.5 × 48 inches
Edition of 30 plus 3 artist's proofs
Presented by Marian Goodman Gallery
