Giant Chairs Collide at New York's Armory Show
Two oversized chairs are drawing crowds — and questions — at the Armory Show in New York.
Dominican-American artist Lucia Hierro has installed two 7.5-foot-tall steel chairs in the fair's Platform section, a slot reserved for large-scale works. One is blue. One is green. Together they are titled Nuestra Silla (Our Chair) (2026), and they were made for the fair, which ran September 24–27 at the Javits Center in Manhattan, according to reporting by Artnet.
Hierro's chairs take a familiar street object and blow it up. They reproduce at large scale the lightweight plastic chairs found on porches and around sidewalk domino games in Dominican neighbourhoods in New York. Her New York gallery, Marc Straus, produced and presented the pair. It is her first public sculpture.
The wrinkle is that another artist has been showing a very similar giant blue chair since 2023. Artist Kuril Chto created an 8-foot-tall blue work titled Blue Chair XXL made of fibreglass, foam and acrylic polyurethane, while Hierro's chairs are made of stainless steel.
Chto calls his chair form a "Monobloc," meaning it is cast from a single mould, the same way cheap stackable plastic chairs are manufactured. Chto is the working name of Andrey Zaytsev, 37, who was born in St. Petersburg in Russia. Zaytsev left Russia in 2017 and has lived mainly in Lisbon in Portugal. He received an MFA in painting, a postgraduate art degree, from the New York Academy of Art in 2024.
His big blue chair has a paper trail. It was first shown at Galeria Foco in Lisbon in 2023 and at the CAN: Contemporary Art Now fair in Madrid. Smaller versions appeared in 2024 during the Venice Biennale in Italy, in the exhibition "Under Jove's Protection" presented by Bahnhof Gallery in New York.
Hierro told Artnet she had never seen or known of Chto's work. She described the overlap as "parallel thinking."
Giant furniture is not new in art. American artist Robert Therrien began turning tables and chairs into towering sculptures in the early 1990s. His Under the Table (1994), a table-and-chairs group almost 10 feet tall, is held in collections including the Broad in Los Angeles.
What makes this stand out is how quickly visitors connected the dots. Phone photos travel fast. A work made for one crowded fair can meet its double within hours.
The Armory Show, held each year at the Javits Center at 429 11th Avenue, has been running in New York since 1994. Works from the 2026 edition remained viewable online until October 4, according to the Armory Show.
