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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.

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ABOUT ARTISTS : Milton Avery

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Milton Avery (b. 1885, Altmar, New York; d. 1965, New York City), one of the great American colorists of the twentieth century, distilled landscape, still life, and figuration into understated yet euphoric compositions of light, form, and pattern. Known as the “American Fauve,” Avery made paintings that bridged Impressionism’s dedication to experiential representation, American modernism’s tendency toward flatness, and Abstract Expressionism’s concern with surface. In 1951, the artist said: “I like to seize one sharp instant in nature, imprison it by means of ordered shapes and space relationships to convey the ecstasy of the moment. To this end I eliminate and simplify, leaving nothing but color and pattern.” Prefiguring later developments in Color Field painting, he worked with broad swaths of thinned-out paint, eschewing modeling and perspective in favor of unmodulated planes of color and flattened space. Despite his pared-down style, Avery remained devoted to subject matter, depicting landscapes, domestic scenes, and other images from everyday life with unbridled intimacy. While his adherence to traditional motifs confounded critics of his era who equated what was then termed “advanced art” exclusively with abstraction, his achievements in painting were immediately recognized and celebrated by artists such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman. As Rothko wrote in his eulogy for Avery, “there was nothing tentative . . . He always had that naturalness, that exactness and that inevitable completeness which can be achieved only by those gifted with magical means, with those born to sing.” During his lifetime, Avery had institutional solo exhibitions at Phillips Memorial Gallery (now Phillips Collection), Washington, DC (1943); Portland Art Museum, Oregon (1947); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1952); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (1956); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1960); and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (1964), among others. Other institutional solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965); National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution (1969); Brooklyn Museum (1970); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1973); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1980); Whitney Museum of American Art (1982); Milwaukee Art Museum (2001); and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2021). His work is represented in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art, Madrid, Spain; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. In October 2025, Milton Avery and his Influence on Contemporary Art will open at Malta International Contemporary Arts Space.

Art Basel Qatar is Art Basel's fifth premier event and our newest show, running February 5-7, 2026 in Doha. Anchored in a dynamic long-term partnership with Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and QC+, Art Basel Qatar will debut as a concisely curated showcase celebrating Qatar’s vibrant cultural landscape and the dynamic arts ecosystem of the MENA region. The inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar will be held at M7, a creative hub in the heart of Doha, as well as at the Doha Design District in downtown Msheireb.

mpefm QATAR fair art press release