September in New York is a sensory crescendo—fashion, tennis, and art converge in a city that thrives on spectacle. At the center of it all, The Armory Show 2025 returned to the Javits Center from September 4–7, hosting over 230 exhibitors from 35 countries and drawing more than 50,000 visitors. This year’s edition, the second since its acquisition by Frieze, was slightly smaller than last year’s—but no less ambitious. Dealers reported strong momentum from VIP day onward, especially for works at lower price points, while higher-priced pieces moved at a measured pace. Many noted a noticeably younger crowd—engaged, curious, and eager to discover.
Under the leadership of newly appointed Director Kyla McMillan, the fair has evolved into a dynamic platform for dialogue. It retains its New York identity while embracing a sharper, more inclusive curatorial focus. “We want to be the essential American fair,” McMillan says—not in dominance, but in resonance.
European participation added a vital layer to the fair’s international scope. Fifty-two galleries from across the continent brought curatorial rigor and regional nuance. The United Kingdom led with 17 London-based exhibitors, including White Cube, Richard Saltoun, and Gazelli Art House. Germany followed with seven galleries from Berlin, including Galerie Robert Grunenberg, Cologne, Stuttgart, and Düsseldorf. France contributed six Paris-based galleries, while Italy’s nine exhibitors spanned Milan, Rome, Venice, Bologna, Turin, Brescia, and Pietrasanta.
The Netherlands and Spain added five more, with strong programs in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Madrid. Eight additional galleries from Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, and Luxembourg enriched the fair’s texture—among them, Brussels-based EDJI Gallery and Sorry We’re Closed, Buchmann Galerie from Lugano, and Galerie Forsblom from Helsinki. Many aligned with the fair’s thematic sections, contributing to broader conversations around design, geography, and social history.
In a fair that emphasized openness, risk, and reflection, Europe’s contribution felt essential—not as an export, but as a collaborator.
Here, we share the standout booths from the European contingent at The Armory Show 2025—spaces that not only impressed but expanded the conversation.
Galerie Templon Paris, France – Brussels, Belgium – New York, USA
Galerie Templon presented a booth anchored by Devoir de Mémoire, a commanding work by Senegalese-born artist Omar Ba, who has recently established his practice in New York. The painting is a quiet storm: layered, symbolic, and unflinching in its critique of Western power structures and historical erasure.
Ba’s use of flattened cardboard boxes—humble, transient materials—evokes the precarity of migration and the fragility of memory. These empty vessels, stripped of their function, become metaphors for lives displaced and histories unrecorded. The work doesn’t document; it mourns, interrogates, and reconstructs. It asks what remains when systems of classification have failed to account for the fullness of human experience.
Devoir de Mémoire is not didactic. Ba’s hybrid figures, ancestral echoes, and enigmatic surfaces resist linear interpretation. His visual language—part myth, part protest, part dream—unfolds slowly, revealing a symbolic architecture that challenges Eurocentric hierarchies and invites a rethinking of identity, belonging, and historical accountability.
Galerie Templon’s presentation reflects its commitment to artists who operate across borders—geographic, generational, and conceptual. Ba’s relocation to New York infuses his work with a transatlantic urgency, bridging Dakar’s ancestral rhythms with the city’s charged political landscape.
BUCHMANN GALERIE Berlin, Germany and Lugano, Switzerland
Buchmann Galerie’s presentation of Bettina Pousttchi’s Horizons offered a rare moment of contemplative rupture—an abstract diptych that shimmered with conceptual density and emotional resonance. Known for its rigorous program spanning sculpture, photography, and public commissions, Buchmann Galerie has long cultivated artists who challenge spatial and material conventions. Pousttchi, a Berlin-based artist whose practice often envelops entire façades, continues this trajectory with Horizons, a work that feels both monumental and intimate.
Two adjacent panels—each layered with photographic impressions and painterly gestures—evoke the spectral architecture of Berlin’s vanished Palace of the Republic. The imagery, derived from Pousttchi’s earlier installation Echo, is screen-printed over monochrome grounds, where brushstrokes remain visible like sediment beneath a digital tide. Weathered reflections and ghostly surfaces suggest a palimpsest of memory, urban decay, and historical erasure.
And yet, Horizons resists nostalgia. It floats. The horizontal bands and aqueous textures recall Monet’s Water Lilies, not in palette or technique, but in their capacity to suspend time. Where Monet offered a meditation on nature’s ephemerality, Pousttchi renders the urban sublime—an elegy for lost structures and the images they leave behind. Her work is not a window but a mirror, refracting the past through the materiality of photography and the gesture of paint.
SORRY WE’RE CLOSED Brussels, Belgium
Sorry We’re Closed presented a rare encounter with the monumental ceramic forms of Jun Kaneko—his iconic Dangosrising like sentinels in the booth’s quiet geometry. Named after Japanese dumplings but bearing the gravitas of ancient menhirs and dolmens, these hand-built sculptures are less objects than presences: meditative, immovable, and charged with a kind of geological grace.
Kaneko first conceived the Dango in 1983, firing six-foot forms in an industrial kiln in Omaha, Nebraska. Since then, his experiments with scale and surface have produced works over thirteen feet tall—recognized as the largest free-standing ceramic sculptures in the world. But their power lies not in size alone. Each Dango is a study in restraint and rhythm, its surface a canvas for painterly abstraction, its form a vessel of silence.
In the context of Sorry We’re Closed—a Brussels-based gallery known for its sharp curatorial eye and its setting in a 19th-century mansion in the Sablons district—Kaneko’s work felt both timeless and timely. The gallery’s commitment to mid-career and emerging artists made this historical intervention all the more striking. Here was a sculptor who defied the boundaries of ceramics, elevating clay to the scale of architecture and the intimacy of touch.
The Dangos recall prehistoric monuments not through mimicry but through aura. Like dolmens, they mark space; like monoliths, they resist interpretation. Their surfaces—glazed, incised, or matte—invite contemplation, not consumption.
EDJI Gallery Brussels, Belgium
EDJI Gallery’s booth was less an exhibition space than a portal—Robert Martin’s Two Bucks transformed it into a fictional Midwestern queer dive bar, complete with dark green walls, “glory hole” references, and the kind of ambient grit that clings to memory. It was immersive, theatrical, and deeply personal: a stage set, a time machine, and a memorial stitched together from fragments of a history barely recorded.
The project began with Martin’s uncle Marti, a Wisconsin journalist who died of HIV in the 1990s. His story, largely untold, led Martin into the archives of regional queer life—vanished bars, ephemeral publications, and advertisements for places long gone. From this research, Martin constructs a speculative history of rural queerness, one that resists erasure through invention.
The works themselves are tactile and raw: airbrushed yellows layered beneath scratched grisaille drawings, surfaces that hover between painting and graffiti. Pool cues become ornamental panels, beer cans morph into clover charms, and a handmade lamp dangles like a relic from a bygone era. Each object carries a double meaning—nostalgic yet defiant, affectionate yet mournful.
The $2 bill that gives Two Bucks its name is obsolete, a metaphor for memory’s fragility. The white-tailed deer, a Midwestern symbol of masculinity, is queered through pairing, while masquerade posters and clown troupes evoke chosen families and the absurdity of survival.
EDJI Gallery, founded in Brussels in 2023, champions ultracontemporary voices that challenge convention. In Martin’s hands, the booth became a living archive—an imagined space where generations of queer lives could mingle, mourn, and celebrate. It was one of the fair’s most emotionally resonant installations, proving that invention can be a form of preservation, and that art can resurrect what history forgets.
MAX EXTRELLA GALERIA Madrid, Spain
Madrid’s Max Estrella Gallery—known for its commitment to both emerging and established voices across media—presented a quietly monumental intervention with Manolo Paz’s sculptural work. Founded in 1994, Max Estrella has long championed artists who fuse conceptual rigor with technical mastery, often engaging with new technologies and interdisciplinary forms. Its presence at international fairs and collaborations with museums underscore a curatorial ethos that is both forward-looking and deeply rooted in artistic legacy.
Paz’s sculpture, usually shown outdoors, is a vertical stack of irregular stone slabs—tapered, weighty, and elemental. It evokes the ancient without mimicking it, recalling the Familia de Menhires series he installed near the Hercules Tower in Galicia in the mid-1990s. But here, the gesture feels more introspective. The stones, balanced precariously yet harmoniously, suggest a meditation on time, gravity, and permanence. They are not just geological forms—they are memory made physical.
The piece stands in quiet dialogue with its natural surroundings: a grassy lawn, a hedge, a sky in flux. It’s this interplay between the organic and the constructed that gives Paz’s work its resonance. The sculpture doesn’t dominate the landscape—it listens to it. Each slab, shaped and placed with intention, becomes a syllable in a language of silence.
DEP ART gallery Milan, Italy
Milan’s Dep Art Gallery offered a moment of lucid reverie with Una Sera by Salvo—a painting that feels less like a landscape and more like a metaphysical proposition. Founded in 2006 by Antonio Addamiano, Dep Art has carved a distinct curatorial path, championing Italian and international artists from the 1960s onward while embracing those who continue to push the boundaries of formal clarity and poetic resonance. The gallery’s name—Distribuzione e Promozione Arte—is both a mission and a gesture toward departure, toward new cultural terrain.
Salvo’s Una Sera (One Evening) is a twilight hallucination rendered in stone and sky. Monumental forms—pillars, cones, hollow cylinders—stand like ancient relics in a dreamlike terrain, their geometry softened by the surreal glow of a multicolored sky. Behind them, tree-like silhouettes bloom in shades of violet and crimson, their canopies flattened into graphic symbols. The horizon burns with gradients of orange, green, and gold, evoking not a sunset but a threshold between worlds.
There’s something deeply introspective in Salvo’s composition. The painting resists narrative; it invites meditation. It’s as if Salvo has distilled memory, myth, and abstraction into a single visual breath.
The Armory Show 2025 isn’t trying to be everything—it’s trying to be meaningful. From Southern studios to sculptural beds, from city blocks to curatorial summits, and from London to Luxembourg, this year’s edition felt alive with intention. As the Hudson breeze slipped through the Javits doors, New York’s art season wasn’t just opening. It was thinking.
About the writer: Eva Zanardi is a freelance writer, independent curator, and owner of Visitor Center, a contemporary art gallery located in Newburgh, NY. Her writing has been featured in various publications, including Flash Art, White-Hot Magazine, Widewalls, and Art & Object Magazine, among other international print and online media. Prior to relocating to Upstate NY, Eva founded and directed GR Gallery, which was known for its cutting-edge contemporary art exhibitions in New York City. Additionally, she serves as the President and Senior Advisor of EZartconsultingnyc, a private art consultancy that specializes in modern and contemporary art.
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