Installation view of Brittney Leeanne Williams at The Armory Show, New York, NY (September 5-7, 2025 / VIP Preview — September 4, 2025).

The Armory Show 2026

Javits Center, 429 11th Ave, New York, NY, Booth P5
September 25-27, 2026 (VIP Preview — September 24, 2026)

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST:

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Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present new sculptures and paintings by Raul De Lara and Madeline Peckenpaugh at The Armory Show 2026.

Living and working in New York City, these two artists create semblances of the natural world through material transformation—Peckenpaugh from abstract painterly gestures, and De Lara from handcrafted wood.

Show Dates & Times
Thursday, September 24, 2026: VIP Preview
Friday, September 25, 2026: 11 am–6 pm
Saturday, September 26, 2026: 11 am–7 pm
Sunday, September 27, 2026: 11 am–6 pm

Location
Booth P5
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.

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present new sculptures and paintings by Raul De Lara and Madeline Peckenpaugh at The Armory Show 2026.

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

Location
Booth P5
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.

Brittney Leeanne Williams
The Body Is an Eye, 2025
oil on canvas
48 x 38 in. (121.9 x 96.5 cm.)

Speaking about her work in this exhibition, the artist stated:

My work explores the body as a site of transcendence, memorialization, suffering, and as a liminal device to the mystical. While my paintings are often figurative, my concerns are conceptual as I grapple with the articulation of the body as both subject and object, engaging ideas of presence and absence. In addition, the body, natural world and architecture often blend and reflect each other in my work. I use 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.

This exhibition represents two strands in my current work. First, I draw on biblical genre paintings of angelic visitation and revelation. In reimagining these tableaux, I often redact the angel or other biblical figure while emphasizing the materiality of drapery as a trace of their presence. Rather than the revelator appearing in human form, the angelic figure is absent, only suggested by their vacated robes. They are stripped of a figure yet are still present. One of these paintings continues my Interruption series, which riffs on neo-classical figurations of statuary and drapery. The interruption depicted in this canvas operates on the level of the picture plane and thematically, as the figures are disrupted by unseen revelations. The drapes in this image complicate the relationship between the figure and ground, foreground and background.

In addition, some of the works in this exhibition operate like talismans or icons. I think of these paintings as aspiring to the power that Simon Critchley ascribes to medieval Christian symbols: “Devotional objects and images impel the attentive viewer to both see the literal thing in front of them and to see beyond. To see both at once.” (Simon Critchley, Mysticism). Again, drapery floats, suggesting an unseen form. The image of the eye that occasionally appears here, sometimes projecting out from a praying form, sometimes framing a ritual token, is a gesture of seeing while being seen. The occasional submissive yet entreating body becomes the source of vision. Activating these eyes evokes being witnessed by the art object, thus evoking the feeling that they themselves see.

Brittney Leeanne Williams
Interruption 8: Integration, 2025
oil on canvas
60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm.)

About the Artists

Raul De Lara in the studio, New York, NY. Photo: Hannah Edelman

Raul De Lara

Raul De Lara (b. 1991, Culiacán, Sinaloa, México) handcrafts wooden sculptures that depict household objects and the natural world. Poetic symbolism emerges, inspired by his experience as an immigrant from Mexico and a DACA recipient. His work balances political messages with exploring the beauty and mystery of the natural world and the mundane.

The artist was included in the gallery’s group exhibition Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, Tahnee Lonsdale (December 11, 2024–January 15, 2025).

De Lara received an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin. He has held museum solo exhibition at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA and The Contemporary Austin, TX. De Lara’s work has been exhibited at Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Museum, CA; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Wharton Esherick Museum, Paoli, PA; MINT Gallery, Munich, DE; The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, NY; and Institute of Contemporary Art | Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, ME. The artist has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times T Magazine, American Craft, and Interior Design, among many others. Accolades the artist has been awarded include the Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft, The Hopper Prize Shortlist, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Craft/Sculpture, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and Luminarts Fellowship Finalist. He lives and works in New York City.

Madeline Peckenpaugh in the studio, Queens, NY 2026. Photo: Philipp Hoffmann

Madeline Peckenpaugh

Madeline Peckenpaugh (b. 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) renders depth through iterations of adding and subtracting paint, creating a semblance of deep and flat space simultaneously. Probing the slips in perception between corporeal experience, memory, and imagination, she shifts the scale of everyday elements, interlaces components, and depicts forms in both single tones and fluctuating textures. The viewer’s trained perception of the landscape can become questioned, as monumental structures begin to vaporize, and natural forms become paper thin. There is a reconciliation of opposites: deep space of the real world with the flat space of the canvas.

This duo booth follows the gallery’s two solo shows with the artist Madeline Peckenpaugh: Chosen Places (May 21-June 25, 2025) and Madeline Peckenpaugh: Farsight (April 12-May 17, 2023). Peckenpaugh was included in the gallery’s booth at the Dallas Art Fair in 2024 and in the group shows The Natural World: Part II (March 9-April 13, 2022) and Sholto Blissett, Emma Fineman, Madeline Peckenpaugh (December 10, 2021-January 22, 2022). Alexander Berggruen represents the artist.

Peckenpaugh received an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Peckenpaugh’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Bremond Capela, Paris, FR; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; F2T Gallery, Milan, IT; Andrew Reed Gallery, Miami, FL; PM/AM Gallery, London, UK; COMA, Sydney Australia; and The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; among others. Her work is included in the public collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Female Artists of Mougins Museum (FAMM), Mougins, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Brown University, Providence, RI; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Peckenpaugh lives and works in Queens, NY.

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

Observer’s Top Five Pieces Not to Miss at the 2025 Armory Show

OBSERVER

Red is a difficult color. Beloved by collectors of the more thuggish variety, many painters avoid it because it’s too dominant. Brittney Leeanne Williams doesn’t fight the red’s power, opting to mitigate it with trompe l’oeil. Her folds are so realistic that when you first approach it, you don’t even think of it as surreal. You see the rocks, the clothes and the reflections, and your brain registers this life-sized silhouette as a person. This is a dramatic and cinematic work without any faces in it. It’s suggestive of the cover of a romance novel from the 1990s, or perhaps a stained glass window. The robe does seem like something Jesus would wear, and the light source does seem to suggest that it’s coming from the non-existent head. It’s appealing how dark and shiny this work becomes near the bottom. It seems to suggest that this work could be many different ways, if it wanted to be.