Brittney Leeanne Williams in the studio, Los Angeles, CA, 2025. Photo: Cassandra Isbell

The Armory Show 2025

Javits Center, 429 11th Ave, New York, NY
September 5-7, 2025 (VIP Preview — September 4, 2025)

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST:

http://bit.ly/ABBowsherMatteMillsChecklist

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present new paintings by Brittney Leeanne Williams at The Armory Show 2025.

Show Dates & Times
Thursday, September 4, 2025: VIP Preview, 11 am-8 pm
Friday, September 5, 2025: 11 am–7 pm
Saturday, September 6, 2025: 11 am–7 pm
Sunday, September 7, 2025: 11 am–6 pm

Location
Booth P10
Javits Center
429 11th Ave
New York, NY 10001.

For additional information and images, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com. You can also find more information about the fair on The Armory Show website.

About the Artist

This solo booth follows the gallery’s two solo shows with the artist Brittney Leeanne Williams: Huddle (November 30, 2023-January 10, 2024) and Brittney Leeanne Williams: The Arch Is a Portal Is a Belly Is a Back (March 5-April 14, 2021). Williams was included in the gallery’s booth at FOG Design+Art (January 19-23, 2022) and in the group shows The Natural World: Part II (March 9-April 13, 2022) and Quarters: Anne Buckwalter, Dustin Hodges, JJ Manford, Brittney Leeanne Williams (March 18-May 27, 2020).

Brittney Leeanne Williams (b. 1990, Pasadena, CA) explores the body as a site of transcendence, memorialization, suffering, and as a liminal device to the mystical. While her paintings are often figurative, her concerns are conceptual as she grapples with the articulation of the body as both subject and object, engaging ideas of presence and absence. The body, natural world, and architecture often blend and reflect each other in her work. She uses the color red—symbolic of a signal—to speak to the Black experience, frequently centering a red Black body as the starting place for a painting.

Williams has been featured in exhibitions at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; The Hole, New York, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Monique Meloche, Chicago, IL; Mamoth, London, UK; Carl Kostyál, Milan, IT and Stockholm, SE; Para Site, Hong Kong, CN; Galerie Droste, Paris, FR; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, GE; Newchild, Antwerp, BE; Collaborations, Copenhagen, DK; and at institutions such as Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco, CA; and Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA; among others. Her work is represented in various public collections, including the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; the Domus Collection, New York, NY and Beijing, CN; HE Art Museum (HEM), CN; Fundacion Medianoche0, Granada, ES; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. She is a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient. Williams’s artist residencies include Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Fores Project, UK; Arts + Public Life; and McColl Center. Alexander Berggruen represents the artist.

For additional information and images, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com. You can also find more information about the fair on The Armory Show website.

Press

Gabriel Mills Glass And The Ghost Children, 2023 oil on wood panel, diptych 120 x 120 in. (304.8 x 304.8 cm.)

Tediums, treasures, traps

THE NEW CRITERION

On the other side of the floor stood Alexander Berggruen’s booth, this year reserved entirely for the artist Gabriel Mills. Berggruen hosted a solo show for Mills last fall, where the best work on display consisted of massive triptychs. The canvases of each triptych in the fall show alternated between thinly painted depictions of airy subjects, such as clouds, and canvases covered in inches of thick impasto. The idea, which is to generate a balance between the lightweight and heavy elements, was interesting then, but Mills has since taken it to another level.

At the Armory, Mills’s Glass and the Ghost Children (2023), a massive diptych, served as the gallery’s centerpiece. It’s electric. In his prior work, Mills conjured interplay by juxtaposing heavy canvases against light ones. Now, that interaction occurs as well within each frame. Weightless currents of oil swirl and stream through their dense counterparts, the former lifting the canvas, the latter bringing it down; an equilibrium is achieved that makes the piece appear to float, suspended in midair. The smaller Ohenguai (2023) and Thira (2023) prove potent too.