10 Best Booths at The Armory Show 2025

That barometer will be closely watched after last season in the U.S. market, which raised questions about the broader health of the industry. The mood across the busy fair floor on the fair’s VIP day offered a nuanced picture. While some galleries reported a more measured dealmaking pace for their most expensive offerings, many of those selling works towards lower price points saw strong collector demand, giving credence to a bubbling optimism shared by dealers across the fair. This was notably true in the Presents section of the fair—dedicated to solo or dual artist presentations from emerging galleries—where several exhibitors reported brisk business within the fair’s opening hours. Some galleries in the section, including Megan Mulrooney, had reportedly sold out their booths by the end of the day.

This year’s fair is also the second under the ownership of Frieze—which is also running its Seoul edition in the Korean capital this week—and the first under the full directorship of Kyla McMillan. McMillan noted the importance of having a sizable platform, pointing to the Presents section, where some 48 galleries are exhibiting.

“It’s incredible to see what an opportunity and what a platform the fair can be, and of course, we hope that the fair is a pipeline for them,” she said. Accessibility is a central part of her mission as director. “You should be able to come here whether you’re not even comfortable calling yourself a collector yet or you’re a collector,” she told Artsy.

Indeed, there was plenty for audiences of all stripes to discover. Across the fair itself, several standout solo presentations were notable across galleries in each section. ACA Galleries director Mikaela Lamarche noted that, “In a fair with over 200 exhibitors, you really need to take a position. You need to own what you’re showing, and so you have to just throw down the gauntlet.”

That clarity of vision shared by many exhibitors gave the fair a noticeable freshness and variety of perspectives. This was bolstered further by the presence of nearly 70 first-time exhibitors such as ILY2, Superposition, and JO-HS. This comes alongside more than 20 galleries returning after a hiatus, including New York stalwarts Andrew Kreps, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, as well as international heavyweights such as White Cube and Esther Schipper. Taken together, the fair put credence to McMillan’s view of the event as “an anchor, certainly within the New York cultural landscape.”

Here, we share the 10 best booths from The Armory Show 2025.

Booth P15

With works by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka

Japanese Canadian Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s Rumination (2025), a massive linocut on handmade washi paper, commands the booth of Toronto gallery Patel Brown with a sweeping indigo wave interrupted by a jagged white line.

This line is a visualization of the rising usage of the word “rumination,” referring to considered thinking, from the 1800s to today. At once a seascape and a data-driven chart, the work transmutes the artist’s concern with environmental precarity into the language of mental health. Here, she makes the case that the fragility of northern Canadian landscapes and the inner turbulence of the mind are bound by the same rising tide. The piece, priced at $36,000, uses paper sourced from Japanese papermaker Tatsuyuki Kataoka.

Hatanaka often assembles her prints into hanging mosaics reminiscent of noren—Japanese textile curtains hung in doorways. Some of these works incorporate self-portraiture. In Spiral (inner world) (2025), Hatanaka pieces together dyed fragments of washi into the silhouette of her own body, surrounded by gyotaku, the traditional Japanese practice of casting fish imprints on rice paper, portraying species she encountered during residencies in Japan and at Black Rock, Senegal.

Additionally, Hatanaka presents some of her series of “Soft snow, hard water” prints. Devan Patel, co-founder of the gallery, told Artsy that the sweeping wave-like formations depicted in the work are based on “snow formations that are used as landmarks to be able to navigate the land, where it often looks very similar.” Each of the 15 editions is priced at $5,800.

Booth P5

With works by Alejandro García Contreras 

New York–based Swivel Gallery staged its booth to resemble a shrine. Alejandro García Contreras’s “Quién no ha intentado convertir una piedra en un recuerdo?” (2024), a skeletal figure comprising several separate glazed ceramic pieces, lies in repose. Surrounding this devilish sculpture, Contreras places six elaborately adorned ceramic vessels, incandescent objects decorated with images of heaven and hell, sex and sanctity, anime and folklore. “We devised the booth to be this modern ruin in a way, so it enshrines this skeletal figure,” said the gallery’s founder Graham Wilson, noting that it was inspired by a book of occultism that the artist received from his grandfather.

Each vessel, hand-built over the course of months, is layered with baroque detail: demonic faces, writhing bodies, flames, swords, and heroines poised in defiance of the male gaze. For instance, Parábola de la Flecha Envenenada (Asuka Como Juana de Arco) (2025) features two swans posed to create a heart, placed directly above a Japanese anime heroine. Much of the work features the artist’s broad array of influences, from K-pop to Mexican folklore. “He’s able to pack all of his life into them,” said Wilson.

Behind the skeleton, Contreras also presents visceral mirror frames—Querubín (2023) and Uroboro XI (2025)—which flank a glazed ceramic tile, La Piedad De Quan Yin y El Eterno Ciclo De La Vida y La Muerte (2025). The central wall work depicts a Blakean vision of religious ecstasy and cosmic struggle, where Quan Yin, a Chinese goddess of mercy, rises amid flames.

Prices ranged from $14,500 for the large ceramic vessels to $20,000 for the mirrors, with the central skeleton priced at $30,000. Midway through VIP day, the gallery had sold four of the big ceramic pieces.

Booth 305

Works by Christopher Le Brun, Brie Ruais, and Tony Marsh 

Three vastly different practices find surprising harmony at the booth of New York gallery Albertz Benda, where Christopher Le Brun’s luminous abstractions, Brie Ruais’s explosive ceramics, and Tony Marsh’s meticulously perforated vessels all converge around a shared obsession with material and form.

Ruais’s Loosening With the Wind (East), 130lbs (2025)—a multi-piece, gestural, wall-mounted ceramic—demonstrates the artist’s physical practice. Beginning with clay equal to her body weight, Ruais worked on the floor, choreographing gestures inspired by ecological forces—in this case, the desert winds outside Santa Fe. The resulting glazed fragments ripple outward like weather patterns. In contrast, Marsh’s Perforated Vessel (2025) embodies a rigorously technical approach. He pours molds to ensure uniformity, then perforates each surface with a metal tool before multiple firings and glaze applications. Priced at $13,500, the vessels have lattice-like skins that feel simultaneously fragile and architectural.

Meanwhile, Le Brun’s Colour II (2025) embodies a lyrical quality, layering reds, pinks, and ochres in rhythmic strokes. “You can see these moments of crescendo, especially in a work like Air (2025), there is a certain atmospheric effect, but there’s also something inherently musical about his approach,” said the gallery’s director, Kate Moger. These works are priced between $54,000 and $120,000 apiece.

K Contemporary

Booth F8

With works by Elizabeth Alexander

Broken tea cups, driftwood, and floral wallpaper: These are the materials Elizabeth Alexander uses for her unconventional, often partially destroyed sculptures that meditate on race and sex in the American South. For the fair’s Focus section highlighting artists and galleries of the American South, Denver gallery K Contemporary has staged a claustrophobic installation where the artist’s hand-cut and intricately reworked vinyl wallpaper drapes around casts of broken household objects.

At the back of the booth, Let Him Speak First (2019) reconstructs domestic objects—chandeliers, rugs, rosettes, porcelain ware—out of vintage wallpaper prints and cast paper. The title is taken from a vintage guide for new wives, a phrase that encodes a domestic hierarchy that still shapes power relations today.

“Her work seduces you with this pattern and beauty into having these nuanced conversations about racism, about domesticity, about sexism in the South,” said the gallery’s founder, Doug Kacena.

Across plinths and walls, Alexander’s reconstructed sconces and porcelain works extend this dialogue. For instance, she meticulously extracts the ornamental patterns that confer value on china tea sets, such as in Service No. 2 (2025). This work extends to three pieces on the right side of the booth, where figures in Confederate commemorative plates are cut out using a crystal-etching nib in a water bath to prevent the porcelain from fracturing. The process reduces the imagery to dust, which Alexander then filters through cheesecloth and preserves in vials beneath the finished works, seen in A Mightier Work is Ahead: A Distant Thunder (2022).

Prices range from $1,000 for smaller porcelain pieces to $57,000 for the large-scale installation. “I imagined a solo booth with her from the very beginning,” Kacena added. “Because of these massive paper installations that are just so inviting. From a distance, they look so heavy and overwhelming. But then, when you walk into them and they’re paper and intricate, they just draw you right in.”

Booth 306

With works by Tesfaye Urgessa

A new body of work by Tesfaye Urgessa on view at London gallery Saatchi Yates’s booth takes a more optimistic approach than his paintings at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where he represented Ethiopia in its national pavilion. While those works centered on themes of violence and war, these new paintings from the Artsy Vanguard 2024 alum offer scenes with glimmers of hope, expressed through earthier palettes and symbolic gestures that imagine new possibilities for the next generation.

One of the key works, School of one love (2025), depicts a teacher surrounded by students with books in hand, while looming images of rifles above them point downward. However, these guns appear to melt rather than take aim. It’s a striking inversion of the weapons that often recur in Urgessa’s earlier work: Rather than threatening, here they signify their own dissolution. The gallery’s director, Alison Ball, added that “the blue door in this painting, which is very sweet, signifies unknown possibilities in life which require a leap of faith. You may not know what is on the other side, but it is worth finding out.” As with all of Urgessa’s canvases, the painting bears his distinctive large, Cubist-tinged assemblies of figures that critics have likened to “Guernica”-esque scenes, in reference to the famed 1937 Pablo Picasso painting.

Prices range from $10,000 for smaller works on paper to $200,000 for monumental canvases. The gallery reported that the early reception from visitors on the fair’s VIP day had been strong, with collectors and curators taking interest. The presentation coincides with a recent acquisition of Urgessa’s work by the Brooklyn Museum and precedes an exhibition at the Sainsbury Center in the United Kingdom later this month.

Booth 215

With works by Jacqueline Surdell

At SECRIST | BEACH’s booth, Chicago-based artist Jacqueline Surdell’s Suddenly she was hell-bent and ravenous (after Giotto) (2025) towers at 14 feet, a colossal reimagining of Giotto’s Last Judgment (1306) remixed from nautical rope and torn-up fabrics printed with the original fresco. Between the fragments of Giotto’s imagery and the dense, sculptural cords, the work invites readings about labor and the persistence of power systems across centuries.

To create her vast textiles, Surdell prints canonical images on canvas and rips them apart, before reconstituting them through the loom, weaving colored ropes into sprawling reliefs that toe the line between painting and sculpture. In Adam and Eve (both 2025), on the outside of the booth, she adapts figures from Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432), recasting them in reliquary-like structures bordered by dense knots. The figures appear as sentinels, guarding the booth’s entry like ornate doors. Across the installation, these historical images are made tactile through Surdell’s labor-intensive knotting.

The monumental Giotto-inspired centerpiece is priced at $300,000, while the medium textiles are priced between $30,000 and $40,000. Dealer Carrie Secrist of the Chicago-based gallery told Artsy that in the first few hours of the fair, collectors had been “blown away.” The 32-year-old artist will have her debut solo exhibition at the gallery in Chicago on September 19th.

Booth 434

With works by Amanda Baldwin

New York–based artist Amanda Baldwin switched her focus from tabletops to ethereal landscapes in 2020. In 2023, she told Artsy that she felt drawn to windows, often featured in the corners of her still lifes. Now, with these new works, Baldwin journeys a bit further, presenting a suite of canvases at London tastemaker Public Gallery’s booth where tree-lined paths unfurl into spiraling skies and kaleidoscopic horizons.

In Savannah Sun (2025), Baldwin composes a fiery spiral of reds, oranges, and yellows that radiates from a glowing core. The canvas evokes both the heat of a setting sun and the unfolding structure of a rosebud, a study in energy that turns inward even as it expands out. Likewise, Heather Haze’s (2025) purplish horizon bends to form concentric rings of light that resemble a portal opening into the sky. The swirling forms recall the Northern Lights yet also suggest the folds of petals or terrain seen from above. These new landscapes appear to shift in scale, bending as if they were rendered in a dream.

Prices for works at the booth range from $14,000 to $45,000. During the VIP day, the gallery reported that the presentation’s largest canvas was placed with a European arts foundation.“The enthusiasm for her work is absolutely contagious, and we’re feeling the momentum with Frieze’s new leadership,” said the gallery’s director, Nicole Estilo Kaiser. “We’ve had great conversations and strong sales this morning.”

Booth 445

With works by Josh Raz

Josh Raz’s canvases feel as though they have been plucked from a memory or dream. In Breakers (2025), for instance, three small figures walk beneath a storm of swirling constellations while a spectral glow illuminates their bodies. London’s Ronchini Gallery is presenting a suite of four works by the British artist, built up from several layers of splattered paint to create works that are at once intimate and otherworldly.

In Deep Ford (Mudlark at Deptford Creek) (2025), the perspective shifts to the underside of a bridge, where a river glimmers with uncanny light. Beneath the arch’s dark bricks, figures wade in shallow water, surrounded by gold glints resembling apparitions. The scene is grounded in place yet hallucinatory, as if surfacing from a half-remembered experience. The tension between clarity and dissolution is central to the artist’s work.

“Josh Raz’s work is both impressionist and expressionist,” said Ruben Alessandro Tanzi, sales associate at Ronchini. “For example, you can see that the landscapes are painted in a way of how the artist feels about those landscapes, so they become ethereal. In another sense, they’re very impressionistic because there are no contours around the figures, but they just arise from the many layers.”

With prices between $20,000 and $25,000 apiece, the presentation had already seen two works sold by the fair’s VIP day. For Ronchini, the decision to mount a solo booth was straightforward: “Plenty of galleries like this one, it’s good to come with a solo proposal because there are so many artworks, so many artists to see, and then when you come with a solo presentation, it sticks better to the memories of the collectors,” added Tanzi.

ACA Galleries

Booth 124

With works by Doowon Lee

A bestiary of fantastical creatures fills ACA Galleries’s booth, where Korean artist Doowon Lee’s wool paintings stage encounters between jaguars, heroes, frogs, and flocks of brightly feathered birds. In Birds in a Stormy Night Sky (2025), jewel-toned avians soar alongside helicopters and planes above a three-person band riding atop a giant tortoise. In many cases, these animals share the jungle together in an uncanny harmony, as seen in Black Duck and Frog on a Rock Beneath Chili Plants (2025). This whimsy, in the eyes of the gallery’s director Mikaela Lamarche, is much-needed in today’s world.

“Doowan Lee perfectly summarized everything that the world needs right now: optimism, hope, inclusivity, magic,” she told Artsy. “[His work] encourages you to find your childlike wonder. There are magical beasts, there are curious lions, there are happy frogs. There are all kinds of magical environments that invite you to be in, and it helps transcend this moment in time, which is a very scary, non-inclusive time.”

Lee calls himself a “nomadic artist,” who constantly travels the world to learn about new techniques from various cultures. These works were inspired by his travels to Pakistan, which began in 2012. He paints flora and fauna onto the thick wool sourced from the country. Anchoring the booth is a handwoven carpet produced by Pakistani artisans inspired by one of Lee’s paintings, offered at $18,000. (The original painting was sold earlier this year to a collector in London). Smaller works begin at $5,000, while Birds in a Stormy Night Sky is priced at $42,000.

Booth 225

With works by Chico da Silva, Michael Wang, Emilio Perez, Marco Maggi, Jean Degottex, Jane Yang D’Haene, Peter Kim, Heryun Kim, Anne Lindberg, and Suzanne Joelson