Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola from Carbon 12 Gallery. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
Since 1994, New York’s The Armory Show has welcomed contemporary galleries from around the globe in a celebration of art, bringing curatorial leadership together with inspiring engagements with the public. Described as “essential to New York’s cultural landscape”, the show gives space to challenge curational boundaries, support the next generation of gallerists and create meaningful relationships between artist and gallery.
This year, the show returned for the second time to the Javits Center during New York Fashion Week. While in-between fashion shows, SLEEK visited The Armory Show to indulge in some art. Read our roundup below.
Bernhard Martin from Dittrich & Schlechtriem gallery. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
Dittrich & Schlechtriem – Berlin
Founded in 2011, the Berlin-based Dittrich & Schlechtriem specialises in conceptual and abstract contemporary art. Located on Linienstraße in Berlin-Mitte, the gallery is home to an impressive variety of art forms; from painting to sculpture to installation, and focuses on representing and supporting young artists by providing them with a space for ambitious exploration and innovation.
Featured at the Dittrich & Schlechtriem stall we found Bernhard Martin, a visionary conceptual artist who creates dazzling visualisations mixing oil paintings, sculptures, and coloured pencil drawing. Concerned with battling coherence and visualising the inconceivable, each canvas is an over-coded spectacle combining elements of trash, opulence, eros and tragedy. Martin’s surreal imagery weaves together reality and fantasy to create psychological and philosophical observations that deconstruct traditional understandings, venturing in a terrain where everything is valid and the only rule to abide is the first law of kitsch: be effective!
Jose Carlos Martinat from MARC STRAUS gallery. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
MARC STRAUS – New York
Established in 2011, MARC STRAUS is a contemporary art gallery in New York’s Lower East side that turns their gaze abroad to foster the careers of some of the most exciting international talent.
At The Armory Show, the gallery brings the striking work of Jose Carlos Martinat, a Peruvian artist who elaborates on the social and political unrest of Latin America by appropriating the symbols found on the surfaces and walls of the urban landscape. Banner-like objects are made from transfers of hand painted political posters found on the streets by means of lifting off the texture of the paint in resin. The artist carefully removes a layer of wall, much like a fresco, and relocates them in the exhibition space, hanging them in the middle of the room to expose the back, revealing an overlap of previous posters in an archeology of outdated economic models and overwritten political promises.
Michael Igwe from Rele Gallery. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
Rele Gallery – Lagos, Los Angeles
Presenting works from African artists across two locations in Lagos, Nigeria and Los Angeles, USA, Rele Gallery is focused on creating an expansive appreciation and recognition of contemporary African and diasporic art by placing it in international contexts.
Michael Igwe is one of the eleven artists represented by Rele Gallery. Igwe’s work is an introspective journey into himself while painting others. His characters are drawn from his memories and his mind, but each bears a reflection of his emotions at the time of painting. As if taken from a dream, faces can’t quite be distinguished, colours feel loose as though they could wash away at any moment, and the viewer is called to fill in those details from their own subconscious.
Iyunla Sanyaolu from Rele Gallery. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
Equally cryptic, but at the opposite side of the visual spectrum, Rele Gallery presents us the striking self portraits of Iyunla Sanyaolu. Torn between sculpture and line drawing in her artistic journey, Sanyaolu found a way of incorporating both in a distinctive technique of painting that mixes materic spatula strokes and scratching line marks. Her purposely obscure compositions play with repetition, time and overlap, unbothered by the necessity of being grasped at first sight. Only upon a calmer and more insightful inspection, an entire scene uncovers beneath the layers of brushstrokes.
AES+F from Rele from Galleria Senda. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
Galleria Senda – Barcelona
Galleria Senda values and nurtures the talent of young and established artists from both local and international locations. The Barcelona based gallery works to defend the value of individuality by avoiding closed minded programs or narrow lines of thought. Inspired by the richness of its multiple languages, Galleria Senda aims to identify singular worlds in which we can be artistically reflected in order to create collective growth.
This year Senda presented the Berlin-based, Russian collective AES+F. Notorious for their controversial and groundbreaking work, their most recent series consists in a set of porcelain statues centred on the theme of migration and white saviour complex. Borrowing from the aesthetics of tabletop decorations, a symbol of contentment and bourgeois comfort, the scenes depict migrants on rafts being saved by white tourists in jet skies and surf boards. The clash between the seraphic smile of the figurines and the tragedy of the topic at hand confers an eerie aura to the objects. The recent waves of migrations have confronted Europe with a dilemma: whether to accept refugees – allowing them to enter at the cost of the material and psychological comfort of their hosts; or to reject them in an immoral, inhumane, and cynical act that would undermine the co-operative ethical basis of Europe itself.
Alvin Armstrong from Anna Zorina Gallery. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
Anna Zorina Gallery – New York
Established in 2013, the New York based Anna Zorina Gallery represents contemporary emerging and established artists who allow intuition and intelligence to coexist, engaging with the world through strong constructive responses to aesthetic, cultural and personal questions.
The gallery this year decided to set up the space with artificial grass and an upside down American flag to introduce the powerful series “Race” from Alvin Armstrong. The play on word of the title sets the stage for the viewers, who are presented in direct confrontation with horses running towards them as soon as they set foot on the green. Rooted in the personal nostalgia of open land, ridership, freedom, speed, the paintings further portray the broader associations of horses including the advantageous use of their immense power as beasts of burden. The Americana lyric titles are a nod to the fact that Black Americans have never been afforded the liberties of justice and freedom.
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola from Carbon 12 Gallery. Image Courtesy of The Armory Show.
Carbon 12 Gallery – Dubai
Established in 2008, Carbon 12 demonstrates a comprehensive global programme of institution-grade artists. Over the last fourteen years, Carbon 12 has introduced both established and emerging artists to the UAE contemporary art scene.
For this year’s Armory Show, Carbon 12 presented Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola who showcased a nuanced selection of textile works from his series “Camouflages”. An exploration of the unrepresented soft side of black masculinity, Akinbola work manifests itself through canvases bursting with colour through a careful weaving of du-rags. By placing the durag in the context of high art, Akinbola elevates its status from a mere everyday low-cost material to a ready-made object that reflects the communities and cultures in which its presence is intimately recognised and used.