Opening reception: Thursday, June 27, 6-8pm
Blum & Poe is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist March Avery. The exhibition, which is Avery’s first with the gallery, introduces a body of work spanning over five decades and is the artist’s first extensive solo presentation in New York in over twenty years.
Focusing on portraiture and landscape and punctuated with still life, the selection of works on view repositions the vitality of moments passed through paint applied to canvas. Mothers read bedtime stories; children eat breakfast, sit on laps, and play Chinese checkers; clouds hover over the surface of a cerulean blue lake; and potted plants are placed amongst a child’s toys or present themselves in paintings hung behind a sofa, upon which a young woman reclines in the company of a cat. These diaristic tendencies that characterize Avery’s oeuvre encapsulate a lifelong commitment to the process of painting itself.
Born in New York in 1932 to painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel, March has been encompassed by a creative constancy and intensity since her earliest years. This essential commitment to one’s practice is made evident by the fact that March has painted on a daily basis for the better part of the last eighty years. This adoption of painting as routine echoes the ways in which she has inherited a parallel reduction of form and chroma implemented in poetic compositions for which her father and mother are best known. While Milton and Sally’s techniques most adhere to modernistic approach, March’s application extends itself with more realist tendencies. Despite the concurrence of association to her parents’ legacies, this intent observation of her surroundings and experience occasions an inimitable representation whereby precedents of innovation proffer departure towards the familiar, namely the people, places, and daily disciplines that March holds most dear.
In March Avery’s work we are presented with a looking glass of sorts in which origin is itself preserved by the nature of its own reflection.
—Jenni Crain
March Avery (b. 1932, New York, NY) works and lives in New York City with her husband, Philip G. Cavanaugh, and close to her son, the painter Sean A. Cavanaugh, his wife, and their daughter. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented in galleries throughout the US in cities such as New York, NY; Provincetown, MA; Washington, D.C.; Wellfleet, MA; Santa Fe, NM; Atlanta, GA; New Orleans, LA; and Chevy Chase, MD; among others. In spring of 2019, a solo exhibition of Avery’s works curated by Jenni Crain was presented in the Louise McCagg Gallery at Barnard College, NY. In 1994, a solo exhibition of Avery’s works dating from 1974-1994 was presented at the Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University, CT. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at but not limited to the Art & History Museums, Maitland, FL; Hofstra Museum at Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY; Long Island Museum of American Art, Stony Brook, NY; Louise E. Thorne Memorial Art Gallery at Keene State College, Keene, NH; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, NY; Rahr-West Museum, Manitowoc, WI; Rockford Museum of Art, Rockford, IL; Sweet Briar College Art Gallery, Sweet Briar, VA; US Mission to the OSCE, Vienna, Austria; and the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, Woodstock, NY. March Avery’s work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions alongside the work of her mother and father. Her work is currently on view at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT within the exhibition Summer with the Averys [Milton/Sally/March], curated by Kenneth E. Silver and on view through September 1, 2019.