The Armory Show 2025

By DAVID JAGER September 7, 2025

Some equanimity, or dare we say, positivity, has returned to the Armory Show in 2025. Though many Manhattan blue chips are notably absent (for reasons worth discussing elsewhere), the 350 plus international galleries in this year’s showing still manage to overwhelm us with over abundant signs of where the art world is sailing to next.

The headwinds are refreshingly varied. Rather than a single dominant theme, as in previous years, several smaller trend appear to coexist. Figuration and representation continue their ascendancy, but recontextualized through lenses so varied as to constitute something new. There is also a continual return to earlier eras.  New artists have become so adept at quoting and cribbing history that distinguishing between contemporary and earlier painting can become nearly impossible.

Nearly every work here has something lifted from the art of a previous era. Has Hip Hop convinced younger artists there is no shame in borrowing something old to make something new? Or is it the influx of small screen shows that play with historical narratives, a la Bridgerton? Hard to say, but I’m digging the new temporal fluidity.

Jammie Holmes brings back the seventies for Marianne Boesky with “A Few Great Men”. It is a thirteen-foot-long, mural sized tribute featuring anonymous Black Panther members painted in Grisaille, offset by gleaming gold accents. The style borrows from the visual vernacular of a city mural, evidenced by the large, dramatically foreshortened fist dominating the canvases center. It brandishes itself in the viewers face wearing two cameo portrait rings: the face of James Baldwin, and a portrait of Holmes himself. A retro statement piece at a newly contentious time, it’s ruminative echo from our recent history.

Jammie Holmes "A Few Great Men" Acrylic, gold leaf, gold glitter and oil pastels on canvas
72 x 160 inches, photo by David Jager

In turn Tessfaye Urgessa, originally from Ethiopia, revives early modernism for Saatchi Yates. Quoting cubism and earlier muralism, his dramatic, figurative tangles nearly fit into the school of Hale Woodruff or Charles White. His use of cubism is so strong and adept however, you can’t help but suspect he is re-appropriating the very modernists who borrowed from traditional African art. Does this mean the cycle is complete?

Despite these nods towards history, Urgessa commands his own visual space. Visceral energy animates each canvas, while his muddy, burnt Sienna and ox blood palette grounds the imagery. These are pictures rooted in the experience of earth and the human body.

Tessfaye Urgessa "The Market" Oil on Canvas 108 3/10 X 78 4/10, photo by David Jager

Southern Guild Gallery from Cape Town features a classically minded portrait by Romeo Mivekannin, that has to be seen to be believed. Mivekannin’s Lady Agnew of Lockjaw claims it is after Sargent. It’s more Francis Bacon or Julian Schnabel, in all honesty. The figure’s emergence from the deep black ground, combined with her piercing gaze from a head that seems to nearly hover above it's own body, is frankly unnerving.

Roméo Mivekannin "Lady Agnew of Lockjaw, After Sargent" Acrylic on Velvet 80.7 X 56.3, photo by David Jager

303 Gallery snaps back with painting that is more bracingly contemporary. Tala Madani's painting Not Yet Titled, sports disaffected men who occasionally have disco balls for bodies. They appear to be in different states of activity, self-involvement, or dismay, evoking a malaise that is palpably familiar.

Meanwhile Huxley-Parlour from London have a slightly hidden gem by Lisa Sanditz entitled “Little Man”. A young woman at the edge of a stream sits before a man who is no more than half a foot tall. It is all rendered in a deliriously scribbly throwback to Vlaminck, with its bright fauvist colors and virtuosic loose hand. In its pleasant dreaminess and irreverence it encapsulates the current contemporary painterly mood of ‘borrow from everywhere, explain nothing’.

Lisa Sanditz "little Man" Acrylic on Canvas 54 X 42, photo by David Jager

Eileen Akimoto, in the meantime, could very well be pointing in a viable direction for figurations future. A standout at Berlin’s Galerie Judin, she unsettles the eye with her careful attention to detail. In Window view #2, a woman sits in an oddly abstracted window crowded with cherry tree branches. She stands out against a deep, matte black void, however, making us doubt the room altogether. Meanwhile, her hair, completely obscuring her face, pours like a blurred digital waterfall into her cupped hands. Nakimoto plays with legibility on the hyperreal end of things, taking us into new visual territory that feels very of the moment. 

Ellen Akimoto, Window View 2, 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 140 × 120 cm, courtesy of Galerie Judin, photo by David Jager

Nicodim echoes many of these new attempts to push legibility in an almost graphically stylized direction, such as Agnes Agrela’s glowering young women with bright neon hair. They carry on in the tradition of Kehinde Wiley- making a muted but noticeable come back in other booths-continuing his tradition of portraiture framed by hyper stylized decorative and patterned elements. The discontent on the faces is real, however. 

Teresa Murta is the other Nicodim standout. Her surfaces are ultra flat and apparently scraped or smeared in the manned of Max Ernst, producing a semi abstraction that is oddly dense and metaphysical. Both Murta and Chantal Khoury , who recently showed at Nicodim’s new York location, are artists who reclaim forgotten strains of mystical and lyrical expressionism once championed by obscure but noted Boston expressionist Hyman Bloom.

Teresa Murta "The Pose" Acrylic on Linen 2025, photo by David Jager

Finally Pow Martinez’s outsider primitivism shows once again that painters from the Phillipines, a specialty at Silverlens, are more brazenly LA than LA could ever hope to be. Whatever the case, Martinez’s gives us crazed eyeballs at a computer or bikini clad powerlifter playing synthesizers with her feet. Hard to know what it means, but its super Lo Fi stylish, of the moment, and fun.

Pow Martinez "Pedigree" Oil on Canvas 60 X 48, photo by David Jager

In the meantime, materiality and the abstract revival are handsomely represented by Anthony Akinbola at Sean Kelly, whose fabric abstraction, “Camouflage ‘Rockaway’” harmonizes its colors and subdivisions of space in classic modernist fashion. Only after some scrutiny do you realize that is is made entirely from durags applied to wood panel. Akinbola echoes Theaster Gates use of roofing tar paper, where the personal historicity of the art resides, almost secretly, in the materials used.

 Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola Camouflage “Rockaway”, 2024 durags on wood panel 72 x 72 inches, photo by David Jager

Some galleries attempted to address everything at once, such as Pierogi Gallery's interesting jumble of elements. There are Patrick Jacobs dioramas set directly into the wall, providing round windows into dense, fantastically detailed landscapes. Meanwhile Hugo Crosthwaites overlay of bold white painted graphics over black and white urban photographs-hands holding guns and bleeding hearts- captures something gritty, arresting and street smart.

Hugo Crosswaithe “Borderlands No.1,” 2022, Pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint on four-ply Museum Board, 24 x 24 inches, photo by David Jager

The Armory is never intended to be taken in as a whole, one’s eyes and feet cannot sustain it. But following the microcosm of each gallery you find a fractured logic that pertains to the whole. We are still grappling with representation and history, and the mighty unconscious power of the image. AI may be hot on our heels, but at this year's Armory the hand and the eye still hold sway. WM