Highlights from The Armory Show 2026

A Haitian-American artist whose work examined race, identity, diaspora, and postcolonial history, Paul Gardère emigrated to New York at age 14 to escape the oppressive rule of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. From then until his death in 2011, Gardère developed a body of paintings and collages that combined classical painting techniques and European art history with Haitian Vodou cosmology, regional symbols, and religious allegory, all while studying at the Art Students League, Cooper Union, and Hunter College, where he earned an MFA in 1972. Using traditional acrylic paint alongside raw, textured materials such as wood, glitter, soil, photography, and cement, he created engaging mixed-media paintings, such as Top Hat, which was featured in the gallery’s sensational solo presentation at the fair.

Image: Paul Gardère, Top Hat, 2000. Acrylic, glitter, digital print, and framed C-print on wood, 26 x 18 1/4 x 4 1/2 in., 66 x 46.4 x 11.4 cm. 

Jacopo Benassi is an Italian artist working across multiple disciplines, including photography, music, and performance. He is best known for his raw, unpolished "punk attitude" and his tendency to challenge conventional artistic forms. Benassi creates sculptural photography and mixed-media installations, transforming two-dimensional photographs into tangible objects by building frames from burned, brutalized, raw wood scraps. His edgy Sonic Youth piece playfully combines raw wood-framed photographs of the noise rock band members—Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo—with elements of a fractured guitar bound with an industrial ratchet anchor strap.

Image: Jacopo Benassi, Sonic Youth, 2026. Fine art prints, artist frames, wooden clips, glass, strap, and guitar, 101×84×14 cm.

A rising star in Europe's art scene, Esben Weile Kjær is a Danish artist and DJ celebrated for multidisciplinary work that blends club culture, performance art, and fine art. His immersive performances, inspired by nightlife, raves, protests, and pop music, explore themes like generational anxiety, nostalgia, consumerism, and identity construction in a digital world. Often featuring staged, chaotic scenes with exaggerated character stereotypes, his art reflects a vibrant exchange of ideas. Based in Copenhagen, Kjær is widely recognized for his stained glass windows, which he sees as "old-school LED screens" that transform spontaneous, energetic moments from his live shows into striking, colorful glass-and-metal paintings, as in Hungry Heart.

Image: Esben Weile Kjær, Hungry Heart, 2026. Stained Glass, 58.86" x 29.53" x 3.35", 149.5 cm x 75 cm x 8.5 cm. Edition Unique.

Omar Rodriguez-Graham, a Mexican-American artist, is renowned for his immersive, large-scale abstract paintings and multidisciplinary works. His practice explores the intrinsic language of painting, bridging digital and analog realms. Blending a thoughtful appreciation of historical art with modern technology, the Mexico City-based artist is praised for vibrant abstract oil paintings that resemble wall sculptures. He begins by selecting famous Western artworks—whether figurative, landscape, Renaissance, or Baroque—and then uses digital tools to alter, vectorize, and distort these classic compositions, transforming them into entirely unrecognizable abstract pieces, such as small-scale color pencil, acrylic, and ink on linen works—including Retrograde—which he exhibited at the fair.

Image: Omar Rodriguez-Graham, Retrograde, 2026. Color pencil, acrylic & ink on linen, 19.69" x 15.75", 50 cm x 40 cm. 

Contemporary Chinese ink painter Liu Tianlian reimagines traditional Chinese brushwork, known as “gongbi hua,” through a modern, global lens. Originally from China and now living between Beijing and Los Angeles, she creates detailed, dreamlike paintings and three-dimensional, collage-style works that blend figurative and abstract elements. She primarily paints on silk or paper with traditional Chinese pigments, yet employs an unconventional approach to achieve a distinctive three-dimensional effect. Her meticulously rendered paintings explore cultural identity, labor, and the immigrant experience, drawing inspiration from everyday American spaces, such as nail salons and 24-hour laundromats, and transforming them into surreal, whimsical visual stories, as seen in her critically acclaimed Laundry Room installation at the fair.

Image: Liu Tianlian, Spin Cycle 3, 2026. Mineral paint and ink on silk, 36 x 24 in, 91.5 x 61 cm. 

Gio Swaby is a celebrated Bahamian multidisciplinary artist known for her vibrant textile portraits that explore and honor the connections between Black identity and womanhood. She considers her detailed stitched works a "love letter to Black women" and views personal style as a powerful expression of self-authorship and empowerment. The Toronto-based artist, who learned to sew from her seamstress mother, primarily works with fabric and thread on canvas or muslin. Instead of pencils or paint, she uses freehand stitching to draw and paint with textiles, carefully combining line, texture, and color. The Fantastic Beauty of Continuing On (Janine), from the gallery’s two-person presentation at the fair, captures the subject's essence by intuitively transforming a photo of a friend into a distinctive work of art.

Image: Gio Swaby, The Fantastic Beauty of Continuing On (Janine), 2026. Cotton fabric and thread stitched onto canvas, 36" x 24" x 1", 91.44 cm x 60.96 cm x 2.54 cm. 

An American painter and visual artist based in Brooklyn, Matthew Hansel creates surreal, immersive mock-history paintings blending classic European styles with modern elements like pop culture, cartoons, and digital visuals. Prior to fully pursuing his fine art career, he spent ten years in the entertainment industry, where he crafted realistic Old Master replicas and scenic backdrops for theater and film. This intensive experience enabled him to excel in classical European techniques, oil painting, and sophisticated trompe-l'œil methods. His paintings are heavily inspired by Dutch Masters such as Hieronymus Bosch, often featuring detailed classical imagery and self-portraits, including the recurring male figure tumbling through his lively Parlour Games painting from the gallery’s solo booth show. 

Image: Matthew Hansel, Parlour Games, 2026. Oil on canvas, 70.08" x 57.87", 178 cm x 147 cm. 

MaryKate Maher is a multidisciplinary artist known for her abstract sculptures and two-dimensional collages. Born in Philadelphia and now based in New York, she began with painting and expanded her practice by cutting voids into her canvases and transforming them into abstract landscapes with a sense of volume and atmosphere, while also presenting them as free-standing, three-dimensional pieces. Exploring themes such as geology, landscape mythologies, the human body, and mapping the intangible, her works are highly process-oriented and experimental, uniquely combining digital and analog media. Her sculptures, such as the sublime Coordinate (Ochre), respond to her two-dimensional collages by transforming flat digital gradients into solid, grounding shapes.

Image: MaryKate Maher, Coordinate (Ochre), 2026. UV prints on aluminum and faux leather, aqua resin, hydrocal, dibond, acrylic paint, and stainless steel base, 48 x 54 x 12 in. 

An international, multidisciplinary art collective led by Brazilian-born artist Eli Sudbrack, assume vivid astro focus seamlessly blends painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, video, music, and performance. The group comprises musicians, architects, designers, and performers who challenge traditional notions of individual authorship, often creating immersive, large-scale multimedia environments that function as art installations, political statements, and carnivalesque nightclubs. At the fair, the gallery displayed some of the collective’s ablaze vibrations amplifying fluidity paintings, including Eleganza Extravaganza, which explore the interplay between color as a universal language and its capacity to heal and energize, using a palette heavily influenced by Sudbrack's Brazilian roots.

Image: assume vivid astro focus, Eleganza Extravaganza, 2024. Acrylic, textures, oil stick and collage on duplex sheet of corrugated kraft paper, 154.9 x 120 cm, 60 15/16 x 47 1/4 in. 

Tony Matelli is an American artist and sculptor celebrated for highly detailed hyperrealistic sculptures that combine dark humor, conceptual complexity, and technical excellence. His work serves as an anti-monument, intentionally challenging traditional artistic conventions to explore themes like alienation, vulnerability, human flaws, and life's fleeting nature. Matelli, an artist born in Chicago and based in Brooklyn, creates painted bronze and other materials to challenge perception and explore how we view common objects. He is most famous for his life-sized Sleepwalker sculpture, depicting a dazed man wandering outdoors in only his underwear. At The Armory Show, the gallery presented Matelli's Sideways Breakfast, a playful counterpart to his larger Sideways Dinner sculpture, which was part of his summer solo show at the Belgium gallery’s Knokke space.

Image: Tony Matelli, Sideways Breakfast, 2026. Painted bronze, urethane, stainless steel, epoxy, and cloth, 22 × 18 × 6 in,  55.9 × 45.7 × 15.2 cm.