Five Favourites of The Armory Show 2024

Mickalene Thomas' NUS Exotiques #2 (2023) at Yancey Richardson

It was Black female erotica from the 1950s French magazine Nus Exotique that inspired Mickalene Thomas to produce a series of collages for her solo exhibition at Yancey Richardson in 2023.

Now, the New York gallery brings a piece from this series to The Armory Show. The exquisitely framed NUS Exotiques #2 is one of four works by Thomas in this presentation—all demonstrating her career-long dedication to challenging traditional conceptions of beauty and sensuality. A nude woman is layered against a bed of abstract forms, and encrusted on the surface are wavy lines of glittering gold rhinestones.

Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas graduated with an MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and completed the Artist-in-Residence programme at the Studio Museum in Harlem the following year. She rose to prominence for her portrayal of Black women in states of leisure and repose in large-scale acrylic paintings incorporating rhinestones, a central material in her practice that symbolises the complexities of femininity.

This is the final month to see Thomas' major survey, All About Love at The Broad in Los Angeles. (Curator Ed Schad recently talked to Ocula about five works in the exhibition.) The show will soon travel to Philadelphia and later to London. —[O]

Lilian Thomas Burwell's Montagne (2012) at Berry Campbell

At 97 years old, Lilian Thomas Burwell deserves a spotlight in the city she was raised in. New York-based gallery Berry Campbell presents Montagne (2012), a sculpture formed of contoured wood which has been cut and covered with painted canvas. On closer inspection, you'll spy a shard of moulded Plexiglass—a common inclusion in Burwell's later wall-mounted sculptures.

Nature has always been at the heart of Burwell's 80-year career. Her paintings and sculptures are dotted with references to the environment, flowers, and leaves, and it is unsurprising that she is an avid gardener too. 'All my work is a result of what my life is,' she has said.

Burwell kicked off in the 1960s with bold, organically shaped easel paintings; later venturing into the three-dimensional realm as seen in works such as Montagne, an airy, weightless piece shaped like birds in mid-flight.

Since opening a decade ago, Berry Campbell has dedicated its programme to the advancement of women artists. Alongside Burwell, their presentation includes ten paintings and works on paper by artists including Elaine de Kooning, Yvonne Thomas, and a never-before-seen painting by Lynne Drexler, newly released by the Lynne Drexler Archive.

Rinus Van de Velde's As a small child,... (2024) at Tim Van Laere Gallery

'As humans, we have been given a powerful gift to fantasise,' Rinus Van de Velde told Ocula. 'There seems to be a big belief that you have to travel the world to experience things but I think there are many places you can go while sitting in your studio.'

The Belgian artist constructs his fantastical inventions first as cardboard maquettes—depicting scenes from a life that he's never lived—before realising them as drawings, videos, or sculptures. In this oil pastel work, Van de Velde transports the viewer to an unknown stretch of beach, with the text beneath stopping short of identifying the location, or whether this drawing relates to a rehashed experience the artist had himself.

Oil pastels are a relatively new medium for Van de Velde, who had worked exclusively with charcoal in his drawings for the past decade. 'I began looking for ways to introduce colour into drawings, at a scale which could compete with painting,' he explained. 'Once I found oil pastels, everything clicked.'

While Tim Van Laere Gallery presents two of Van de Velde's oil pastel works at Armory, his debut France solo exhibition opens at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris (7 September–5 October 2024), showcasing new drawings along with a film A Life in A Day (2021–23).

Shiwen Wang's Dark Fish (2024) at Michael Kohn Gallery

Shiwen Wang is drawn to the twilight. She has said, 'Before the nightfall, there is a widespread sedimentation sweeping the dusk, whose energy eliminates meanings of all matter... I am eager to open up a space through the medium of lights.'

It was while studying at London's Royal College of Art that Wang's interest in dusk and light came to the fore—an interest with its origins in the absence of light purity in Shanghai, where the artist was born.

Wang's studio walls are plastered with a more diverse assortment of images—among them botanical illustrations, architectural blueprints, and corsage patterns. She poaches the skeletal structures of these images and embellishes them in an abundance of quick brushstrokes, as if to question their genesis and reinvent their design. One such result is the quiet futurism in the painting, Dark Fish.

Michael Kohn Gallery has a solid track record for discovering hot young talents. Last year the gallery brought RCA graduate Li Hei Di and William Brickel from London's Royal Drawing School to the Armory Show; both went on to have lauded solo exhibitions: Li Hei Di at Michael Kohn (2023) and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (2024), and Brickel at The Artist Room (2023). Wang's solo show at Michael Kohn Gallery opens this fall in L.A.

Fathi Hassan's Order of Things (2023) at Richard Saltoun

The text affixed to Hassan's mixed-media work looks back to Kufic and Riqqa: the short vertical lines and long horizontal strokes of Arabic script that Hassan became familiar with while studying calligraphy in Naples.

In Order of Things, however, Hassan playfully transforms the characters to turn the language into nonsense. In an interview with The New Arab, the artist described: 'When I create written work, I never use precise phrases; otherwise, I'd be an author... Often, the text in my work is deliberately illegible, referencing lost languages and oral histories.'

Born in Cairo to Nubian and Egyptian parents, Hassan grew up with the Nubian oral tradition. He was the first African and Arab artist to be included in the Venice Biennale in 1988.