March Avery: Quiet Inside

BLUM is pleased to present Quiet Inside, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with painter March Avery. With a selection of still lifes from the 1960s-2010s, this exhibition offers a glimpse into the artist’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. 

The first monograph published on the artist, March Avery: A Life in Color, will be released in conjunction with this exhibition. Documenting Avery’s practice of more than eighty years, the book features three newly commissioned texts by Johanna Fateman, Lynne Tillman, and John Yau, and some 200 images of Avery’s oil paintings, watercolors, and sketchbooks. Published by Black Dog Press in collaboration with BLUM Books and Larkin Erdmann, this volume will be available at BLUM Los Angeles or via blum-gallery.com.