NEW YORK, NY.- Karma announced the representation of acclaimed American painter Milton Avery (1885–1965), one of the great colorists of the twentieth century. His paintings distill landscape, still life, and figuration into understated yet euphoric compositions of light, form, and pattern. The gallery’s first collaboration with the estate will be a presentation of Avery’s paintings at Art Basel Miami in December 2024. Next fall, Karma will hold a solo exhibition of Avery's portraiture at 549 West 26th Street in Chelsea, New York, with an accompanying monograph. In October 2025, the exhibition Milton Avery and his Influence on Contemporary Art will open at Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS).
“I am thrilled to partner with the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation on an exhibition at MICAS next fall that will communicate the impact of Avery’s pathbreaking paintings to a global audience,” said MICAS artistic director Edith Devaney. “Sixty years after Avery’s passing, his work remains a singular achievement and inspiration.”
As Karma founder Brendan Dugan notes, “The gallery is honored to be entrusted with the legacy of Milton Avery, who left an indelible mark on the history of American image-making. Although he engaged with the major art movements of his day—Impressionism, modernism, and Abstract Expressionism—his subtle, singular meditations on color, space, and line were his own. His work, which prefigured Color Field painting, finds resonance in Karma’s own program, from the compositions of Reggie Burrows Hodges and Jonas Wood to the abstractions of Peter Bradley. It’s a great privilege to work with the Milton Avery family, March Avery Cavanaugh and Sean Avery Cavanaugh, and Waqas Wajahat to further deepen understanding around Avery’s practice. The gallery looks forward to promoting the late artist’s work through rigorous programming, scholarship, and exhibitions.”
Avery found inspiration in the life he shared with his wife and fellow artist, Sally Michel, and their daughter March, both of whom were frequent subjects of his paintings. Together, they read classic literature aloud to each other every evening, visited New York City’s galleries and museums each weekend, and made annual summer trips to paint the coastal landscapes of Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts. Through his ultra-flat, thinly layered application of paint and his masterful command of what scholars have called “arbitrary” color, Avery translated his diaristic sketches into glowing paeans to simplicity and beauty. In every case, he was concerned with capturing light’s effects on his environment.
His heightened sensitivity to color informed the work of his younger friends, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman among them, but it was only later in his life that Avery’s major influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism was fully understood. As Barbara Haskell observes in the monograph that accompanied his 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Avery bridged the gap between realist and abstract art. That he initially did this in the twenties and thirties, when subject matter and ‘realist’ painting were paramount and, later, in the forties and fifties, when they were suspect, attests to the independence of the vision which he sustained throughout his life. His reluctance to position his work within the confines of a single style or rhetorical posture confounded critics and probably delayed the acknowledgment of his deserved place in the history of twentieth-century American art.”
The estate will continue to be represented by Victoria Miro in London and Xavier Hufkens in Brussels.
