This exhibition of thirty  paintings by Sally Michel, created between 1950 and 1985, shows   how her art bridged the gap between representational and abstract painting, in a style that successfully refreshed and moved realism forward during a   period when Abstract Expressionism dominated New York.  Milton Avery (1885-1965) and Sally Michel (1902-2003) met painting in Gloucester,   Massachusetts in 1924. They admired each other’s dedication to sketching all day. Married in 1926, Sally and Milton worked in New York as a unit until   Milton’s death in 1965. To provide support, Sally worked as a freelance illustrator, an occupation she could pursue at home. This allowed her to remain by the side of Milton and their young daughter, while continuing to   develop her own painting. Sally was gregarious and Milton was taciturn, so she became his spokesman. Every Saturday they went to New York’s galleries and museums. They continued to sketch from a model at the Art Students League and later with a group of their artist-friends, at each other’s studios.   Through the 1930s, fellow artists of Sally’s generation, including Mark   Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman frequently came to the Avery home to discuss art. By the mid-1940s Milton and Sally had each developed their   own parallel but unique approaches to painting.   

Milton and Sally Michel Avery were artists dedicated to painting what they saw at a time of   uncertainty for realism in American art. From 1946 to 1958 Abstract Expressionism, a gestural or action painting style with roots in European Surrealism, was at its height of popularity. The Averys saw that bridges between realism and abstraction can go both ways and color, structure, and light are the common denominators. This realization led to recognizing that shapes, spaces, and color form a set of unique relationships independent of any subject matter. The Averys modernized realism by using the shapes of things, the spaces around them, and color in new ways. They treated color less naturalistically to reflect mood and transcend the factual aspects of realistic subjects. The Averys also found that reducing the number of shapes and colors in a painting and eliminating illusionistic rounded volumes and modeled forms added modernity to a scene. Shape and color could become equal when shapes were used as containers of color. Fields of color could be stacked to indicate foreground, middle ground, distance, and sky. The Averys used patterns, organic or geometric, to express the forces as well as the forms of nature. Liquid or transparent areas of paint could embody the forces of wind and water. The refinement of their artistic visions evolved over many years of sketching, painting, looking, and sharing ideas on art.                 

In March of 1964 Milton’s health put him in a New York hospital where he died in January of   1965. Sally worked tirelessly to ensure Milton’s legacy while also continuing to paint and evolve the way she used materials for another twenty-five years. To achieve a dry paint surface with a soft matte feel, she mixed large amounts of turpentine with her paint. Always frugal with pigment, Sally used rags to   moderate layers of color in a shape, and added luminosity by tinting colors with white pigment. Her experimentation with color harmonies was often daring. When she wanted textural interest or to bring attention to the two-dimensional surface of a canvas, she scratched into the paint. In the figures, animals, still lifes, and landscapes she painted, Sally worked to achieve mood and movement rather than detailed representation. She continued to find her imagery in the visible world, often inspired by her own travels. To present images in a modern way took careful consideration and skill in   Sally Michel's use of non-associative color for mood, selection and placement of realistic shapes, and attention to the edges of reductive forms   to achieve flattened compositions. In her art, Sally Michel understood and adapted elements from the two streams of representation and abstraction to   refresh realism, keeping it relevant after Abstract Expressionism.