NEW YORK, NY.- Noah Horowitz, Executive Director of The Armory Show, inaugurated the 2014 edition of The Armory Show, New York’s leading fair for contemporary and modern art, hosting over 200 leading galleries from 29 countries. For the first time this year the fair coincides with the opening of the Whitney Biennial, further establishing March in New York as a key moment in its annual arts calendar and a cornerstone of the American art market. For the 2014 edition The Armory Show has devoted Armory Focus, the specially curated section of Pier 94 to the contemporary cultural landscape in China, presenting an exciting selection of galleries from the Mainland and Hong Kong. The fair will also launch the inaugural edition of Armory Presents, dedicated to dual and single artist presentations exhibited by galleries under ten years old. In its commitment to connoisseurship, The Armory Show–Modern has established a formal Selection Committee of leading dealers and will present its first ever curated exhibition, featuring seminal drawings by female artists of the twentieth century.

Leading cultural figures Glenn Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art; Dorsey Waxter, President of the Art Dealers Association of America; Philip Tinari, Curator of Armory: Focus China and Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Adrian Cheng, Founder of the K11 Art Foundation will also take part in the opening ceremonies, kicking off Armory Arts Week, a rich program of cultural events and exhibitions taking place across New York City.

Armory Focus: China, the fair’s specially curated section will shed new light on the dynamic landscape of Chinese contemporary art today. Curated by Philip Tinari, it will showcase an exciting selection of 17 established and emerging galleries, providing surprising insight and commentary on contemporary practice in China. Furthermore, The China Symposium, generously supported by Adrian Cheng and the K11 Art Foundation, will assemble speakers from around China and beyond, including leading artists, journalists, curators, collectors, gallerists, and academics. The two-day program offers perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the art scene in China yet undertaken for a general New York audience.

Noah Horowitz, Executive Director of the Armory Show, remarks:

“The sixteenth edition of the Armory Show is the most polished, dynamic and content-rich to date. Visitors to the Armory this year will see a notable rise in solo presentations and tightly curated booths, something we have worked tirelessly on with our Selection Committee and participating galleries. In addition our special focus section will provide refreshing insight into the contemporary Chinese art landscape through an exciting selection of galleries from the Mainland and Hong Kong, many of which have never exhibited outside China before. This will be supplemented with thought-provoking on-site projects and talks programme that brings together leading scholars, journalists and practitioners. The Armory Show has always been New York’s home-grown fair and in many ways the energy and density of the fair is emblematic of the urban fabric of the city itself.”

Further on-site highlights include a limited edition art work benefitting The Museum of Modern Art by this year’s commissioned artist Xu Zhen, acclaimed internationally for his conceptual body of work that seeks to confront social-political taboos within the context of contemporary China and beyond. Open Forum, the thought-provoking series of conversations and panels organized by the New York-based curator Isolde Brielmaier will feature noteworthy roundtables that address artist publishing, the role of women artists within today’s market, and the status of biennials. Venus Drawn Out: 20th Century Works by Great Women Artists: curated by Susan Harris, will mark the first curated project to take place on Pier 92, and will focus exclusively on drawings made by female visionaries of the twentieth century.

For the third year running, the fair will be designed by Brooklyn-based architects Bade Stageberg Cox. Bade Stageberg Cox's design concept for this year’s Armory Show is ‘Thresholds’ – suggesting passage and a place of entering or beginning. As the art world embraces work from different cultures and generations, cross pollination occurs; where lines can be drawn they can also be transgressed.

Artsy, The Armory Show's exclusive online partner, will introduce groundbreaking new technology designed to enhance the visitor experience at this year's fair. Artsy Columns, freestanding digital display screens installed in Piers 92 and 94, map the fair and display current data on popular artists, artworks and exhibitors. The Artsy app for iPhone is a personalized navigation and information guide, pinpointing your own favorite artists, artworks, and galleries onsite at the fair.