One-of-a-Kind Milton Avery Showcase Brings Seven Major Artists to Malta
From 25 October 2025 to 4 April 2026, the Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS) in Floriana presents Colour Form and Composition: Milton Avery and His Enduring Influence on Contemporary Painting. This landmark exhibition explores the legacy of American artist Milton Avery through over 30 of his works, displayed alongside pieces by Henni Alftan, Harold Ancart, March Avery, Andrew Cranston, Gary Hume, Nicolas Party and Jonas Wood.
The Malta International Contemporary Art Space is hosting a one-of-a-kind showcase of American modern art that has attracted the orbit of seven major American and European artists.
On display is a survey of artworks from Milton Avery (1885-1965), the American master of colour who influenced the young artists who would later anchor the Abstract Expressionist movement.
It was only until the age of 67 that Avery received his first full-scale retrospective museum exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. By that time, the colour field artists that included Avery’s young friends Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, had become a major force in Abstract Expressionism.
This rare showcase – only the second ever European showing for Avery following the Royal Academy show in 2022 – is a coup for MICAS, which is showing over 30 of Avery’s works alongside many more from those who credit Avery as an influence: Avery’s own daughter March, an artist in her own right, the YBA and Royal Academician Gary Hume, Henni Alftan, Harold Ancart, Andrew Cranston, Jonas Wood and Nicolas Party.
“The exhibition will take Avery slightly out of his time and allow us to look at him with fresh eyes,” says MICAS artistic director and exhibition curator Edith Devaney, who is digging deep into a great American epic that spans over 70 years of influence, to look at Milton Avery’s artworks from a fresh perspective.
“This careful selection of works by participating artists will reveal their very personal relationship with Avery’s work, all tapping into very differing aspects of his practice. In exploring the artistic legacy of Milton Avery and how aspects of that legacy remain detectable in the work of some of today’s most celebrated artists, we intend to recontextualise not only his work, but that of all the contemporary participants, and in doing so, acknowledging the notion of art history not always linear,” Devaney says.
Milton Avery
Born in western New York state to a working-class family, Avery was a factory labourer supporting his family until his thirties, while taking night classes at the Connecticut League of Art Students. He met his future wife while both were sketching on the rocks in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Avery and Sally Michel married in 1926, the couple painting side by side in the living room of their one-bedroom flat in Manhattan.
By the 1950s, Avery’s work developed from his Impressionist brushwork into broader fields of dark hues, finding himself at the threshold of abstraction, locking in his subject in ordered shapes, in his own words eliminating and simplifying, “leaving nothing but colour and pattern.”
Summers spent in Provincetown in the company of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb saw Avery developing more simplified forms, with colours that could deliver the “purity and essence of the idea… expressed in its simplest form.”
This sensational Avery collection at MICAS is unique not just for the wide-ranging group of contemporary painters, all of whom cite Avery’s work as an enduring source of inspiration in their work; this survey of his entire career takes viewers through Avery’s influences in American Impressionism, to his late work from the 1950s through to the early 1960s, where having exerted such a profound influence on the emerging Abstract Expressionist painters, he also took much from them.
For more information visit www.micas.art
