ART CITIES: Los Angeles-March Avery

March Avery’s oil paintings and watercolors exhibit distinct stylistic characteristics that echo the family’s artistic legacy, known as the “Avery style.” Defined by flat picture planes, interlocking shapes, and a simplicity of forms, March Avery’s work stands out with its individuality. While embracing the essence of her family’s oeuvre, she distinguishes herself through her unique perspective.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo Blum Gallery Archive

March Avery was born in New York in 1932 to painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel. Guided by her famous father, she began painting as a child, although as she would tell it, “I think I was painting in utero.” She had her first solo exhibition in 1963. Now in her late eighties, the artist continues to work in her lifelong neighborhood, Greenwich Village. Avery’s oil paintings, sketches, and watercolors carry forward certain stylistic characteristics of the family oeuvre, what art historian Robert Hobbs has called the “Avery style”—flat picture planes, interlocking shapes, and a simplicity of forms—while distinguishing her output as all her own. Raised with the dividing line between life and art blurred, such is the subject matter of her work: quotidian domestic scenes, portraits of friends and family members, and landscapes visited and revisited over the course of a lifetime.  With a selection of still lifes from the 1960s-2010s, the exhibition “Quiet Inside” offers a glimpse into March Avery’s mastery of color, hue, and spatial relationships. In these oil paintings variously portraying flowers and plants in vases, placed on tabletops, alongside animals, or growing from the earth, the New York-based artist celebrates the pleasures of domesticity, nature, and the everyday. Known for her intimate depictions of family members, her social circle, and the interpersonal moments that accumulate into a full life lived, March Avery has also prolifically documented the landscapes, interiors, and objects that surround these subjects. Just as the artist articulates a multitude in a portrait of a mother patiently reading to her child at bedtime, Avery’s still life of a forgotten boutonnière, “The Groom’s boutonniere” (2001), conjures meaningful narratives playing out just beyond the frame. In this painting that both alludes to what was and what is to come, the discarded floral decoration sits atop a coral surface, its stem reaching upward above a soft lilac background, a tuft of baby’s breath clinging to white and red carnations that are now wilted. Another work, “Joe’s Lilies” (1997), is a picture of a round, green vase housing white lilies situated adjacent to a backdrop of pale blue Venetian blinds. Avery’s composition zooms in on an insinuated larger tableau—perhaps a scene as ordinary as the slice she chose for this painting. The blinds, the vase, the lilies—all are unspectacular and quotidian forms that Avery poetically casts and elevates in careful combinations of pigments, creating for her viewers not only a vision, but a feeling. As critic John Yau notes: “This is Avery’s strength. Her use of color is not just descriptive; it conveys the sensuality of the moment.” With a subdued palette in “Lilacs” (1961), we see Avery’s use of simple interlocking forms exemplified; the heart-like sapphire leaves of the plant fit like puzzle pieces with the spongey purple flowering panicles. An abstract expanse of a milky, textured greenish gray is the background for this floral arrangement, a mixture of quiet hues that come together in one contemplative work.

Photo: March Avery, Tulips, 1989/2003/2012, Oil on canvas, 24 x 32 x 3/4 inches, Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes, © March Avery, Courtesy the artist and Blum Gallery

Info: Blum Gallery, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 13/7-30/8/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blum-gallery.com/