For Art Basel Qatar, Karma is pleased to present paintings and works on paper by Milton Avery. Responding to the theme of “Becoming,” this focused presentation of landscapes made between the early 1930s to 1961 highlights Avery’s contributions to the story of American modernism and provides an introduction to his expansive practice.

Avery traveled widely, always sketching and making watercolors of local landscapes that he would then translate into oil paintings in his New York studio. Works on view here include depictions of Mexico; Provincetown, Massachusetts; and the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec. In them, he pushes color beyond realism, rendering skies and seas apricot-orange and turning foliage purple. Animals, a recurring subject for Avery, populate these vistas—horses, both wild and tamed, stand stoically or rear up on their hind legs; seabirds float in glowing azure fields. The artist’s investment in landscape over many decades belies his commitment to painting representationally, a mode he continuously innovated within even as friends and mentees like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman turned decisively toward abstraction. His early works, with their tilted and flattened perspectives, demonstrate the influence of Matisse and Picasso; later examples reduce forms to elegant, simplified shapes that anticipate the work of Ellsworth Kelly. His mature style—luminous, thin layers of oil applied in unmodulated shapes that fit together into pared-back, yet perfectly calibrated compositions—is an entirely original contribution to the twentieth-century canon. Through landscape, Avery relentlessly pursued his own poetic vision of the world.