The Armory Show 2026

Javitz Center, New York NY

Booth P54 Presents Section

September 24 - 27, 2026

The Pit is please to present a solo booth of new works by Kevin Umaña at The Armory Show NYC 2026, bringing together a body of hybrid paintings that expand his ongoing investigation of abstraction through the combined languages of painting, ceramics, architecture, and material experimentation. Across works ranging from intimate panels to ambitious six-foot compositions, Umaña builds densely layered surfaces in which glazed ceramic elements are embedded into painted, shaped supports. The resulting objects occupy a space between painting and relief: simultaneously image, surface, and constructed form.

Born in Los Angeles in 1989 and now based in Brooklyn, Umaña spent his early years between Southern California and El Salvador. The contrasting visual environments of these places remain foundational to his practice—from the natural textures, vegetation, vernacular craft traditions, and patterns he encountered in rural El Salvador to the architecture, density, and cultural hybridity of Los Angeles. Rather than depicting these experiences literally, Umaña transforms them into an abstract vocabulary of fragmented geometries, repeated motifs, shifting symmetries, and highly tactile surfaces.

Umaña pushes this vocabulary toward greater physical and compositional complexity. Ceramic components project from the surface, interrupting and extending painted passages executed in acrylic and oil alongside flock, aventurine, sand, and salt. Matte and reflective surfaces, smooth glazes and granular textures, rigid geometries and irregular handmade forms coexist within individual works. In the two largest paintings, Shadow Of The Shape That Stayed and Abundant Ash and Rubble Fall Softly Yet Decisively, both measuring 72 by 48 inches, these accumulated forms become almost architectural: symmetrical structures that suggest portals, facades, masks, figures, or monuments without resolving completely into any single image.

Throughout the presentation, Umaña moves fluidly between order and instability. Some compositions are governed by grids, concentric forms, mirrored arrangements, and sharply articulated geometry; elsewhere those systems fracture into fields of color and ceramic fragments. Works such as Deep Enough To Let The Earth Hold The Stones and Standing On The Lip Of The Cauldron suggest geological accumulation, eruption, and transformation, while the radiating structure of Dispersion of the Radiant Light Glittering on the Dark Shores in the Night turns the surface into an optical field. Together, the works suggest systems continually being assembled, disrupted, and rebuilt.

Umaña received his BFA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2025. His recent residencies include the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Anderson Ranch, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, and in 2026 he participated in a MacDowell Fellowship. In 2017, he created a permanent installation for the United Nations Headquarters in New York. His work is held in collections including the United Nations Art Collection, Everson Museum of Art, Munson, Fidelity Mutual Funds Collection, Center for Book Arts Library, and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art.

This new body of works mark a compelling expansion of Umaña’s practice: abstraction becomes something not simply painted