Silverlens is pleased to announce its fourth participation in The Armory Show, taking place in New York City from 4 to 7 September 2025. The booth spotlights five artists: Pacita Abad, Emily Cheng, Keka Enriquez, Pow Martinez, and Ryan Villamael. The works on view reflect their unique approaches to materiality and image creation, spanning site-specific cut-paper installation, satirical figuration to luminous abstract collages.

At the heart of the booth are unique works on paper by Pacita Abad (b. 1946, Batanes, Philippines - d. 2004, Singapore), created during her residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2003, just a year before her passing. These works translate her maximalist visual language onto handmade paper in a pastiche of print techniques, paint, sequins, and glitter. “The prints became extensions of my paintings,” Abad reflected, “the results of the STPI collaborative process overwhelmed me… with their luminous colours and textures.” Originally exhibited in Circles in My Mind (2004), her final show during her lifetime at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, these pieces mark a poignant culmination of her practice. Their presentation at The Armory Show follows a landmark period of recognition for Abad, including a four-venue North American retrospective and her participation in the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

Emily Cheng (b. 1953, New York, USA; lives and works in New York) presents her Double Portal paintings, executed in sensorial flashe-on-canvas. As the name suggests, their large scale relates to the human figure like a double door, inviting viewers into a space of contemplation and passage. Cheng’s work is a lifelong search for how “the Sacred” might be made visible. Her paintings speak in a visual grammar shaped by both ancient and modern knowledge, drawing from Eastern and Western art histories, cross-cultural spiritual practices, and forms of contemporary science. She proposes painting as a medium for communion between the human and the universal. This marks Cheng’s first time exhibiting with Silverlens in New York, following her inclusion in a three-artist show at Silverlens Manila. The Armory also follows her major retrospective Where Vision Leads at the Central Art Museum in Hangzhou, China.

Regarded in the Philippines as one of the foremost artists of her generation, Keka Enriquez (b. 1962, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in San Francisco, California) presents a new body of oil paintings that are lavish, expressive, and psychologically charged. These works play with the layered meanings of the word baroque—an ornate design style tied to Spanish colonial architecture—and its Filipino slang counterpart barok, meaning broken or uncouth. In revisiting a label once used to mock her, Enriquez reclaims it as a framework. As she reflects, “I have always had a fascination for the unseen forces, the questionable and the unconscious influences of our upbringing. Whatever the word ‘baroque’ or ‘barok’ hinted at, these words have heralded a series of current paintings.” Enriquez will next be the subject of an exhibition in San Francisco, opening in January 2026.

A salon wall of paintings by Pow Martinez (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) offers a wildly irreverent vision of the “American Medieval,” populated by the artist’s recurring cast of cartoonish characters. Blending movie tropes, pop culture, and the visual residue of the internet age, Martinez constructs a comically distorted portrait of the contemporary condition, from U.S. military and cultural power in the Philippines to social media and the global art market. Though best known for his painting, Martinez’s multidisciplinary practice also spans sculpture, installation, and sound. In 2024, his first monograph, Pow Martinez, was published by ArtAsiaPacific. The Armory presentation follows his New York solo debut Junk D.N.A., held at Silverlens New York in March 2025.

Cut-paper artist Ryan Villamael (b. 1987, Laguna, Philippines; lives and works in Los Baños, Philippines) presents a new iteration of his ongoing, site-specific installation Locus Amoenus, assembled specially for the fair. Villamael transforms colonial and contemporary maps of the Philippines into intricately cut foliage resembling Monstera deliciosa, an invasive tropical plant known to thrive in conquering any space inhabited. The work conjures a lush canopy while interrogating histories of migration and empire. Each version of Locus Amoenus responds to its environment, with previous stagings across seven venues, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and the Singapore Biennale. Villamael will also exhibit a series of cut-paper map sculptures encased in glass bell jars, a body of work that made its U.S. debut in his January 2025 solo exhibition ISLES at Silverlens New York.

The Armory Show opens with a VIP Preview on 4 September 2025, followed by public days from 5 to 7 September.