A Conversation on Milton Avery

Karma presents a conversation with Sean Cavanaugh, Sanya Kantarovsky, and Nicolas Party moderated by Massimiliano Gioni on the occasion of Milton Avery, The Figure at 549 West 26th Street, New York.

Sean Cavanaugh’s work conveys natural subject matter by immersing the viewer in the setting, often zooming in and focusing on the minute details of an individual tree or capturing a solitary wave as it breaks and spreads across a rocky beach. The artist refers to this as macro abstraction, so close that reality blurs itself into abstraction. This approach to documentation and depiction runs counter to the grandeur of Thomas Cole or William Trost Richards but, in doing so, encourages a more intimate engagement. Born in 1969, Cavanaugh received a BA in art and environmental studies from Pitzer College in Claremont, California. He has had numerous solo gallery and museum exhibitions, most recently at the Morris Museum in New Jersey and the Lowe Museum at the University of Miami. His work has recently been shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and can be found in public collections in California, including the Claremont Colleges; the Art in Embassies program in Karachi, Pakistan; Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Massimiliano Gioni is the artistic director of the New Museum in New York, where he oversees the exhibition program. He has curated a range of international exhibitions, including the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); 10,000 Lives, the 8th Gwangju Biennial; The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, the first New Museum Triennial (co-curated with Lauren Cornell and Laura Hoptman, 2009); the 4th Berlin Biennale (co-curated with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, 2006); and Manifesta 5 (co-curated with Marta Kuzma, 2004). At the New Museum, he has organized solo presentations of Lynda Benglis, Judy Chicago, Nicole Eisenman, Theaster Gates, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Faith Ringgold, among others. Gioni also directs the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, a nomadic museum in Milan, where he has curated various solo shows and public art projects with, among others, Paweł Althamer, Tacita Dean, Fischli & Weiss, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Anri Sala, and Tino Sehgal.

Sanya Kantarovsky works across a variety of mediums, as well as writing and curatorial projects, and is primarily known for his figurative paintings. The dark humor consistent in Kantarovsky’s work pits the sumptuous against the abject and thrusts private space–be it physical or psychological–into public view. His recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Aspen Art Museum; Kunsthalle Basel; and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.

Nicolas Party works across the disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. Frequently rendered in soft pastel and blended by hand, his androgynous, biomorphic subjects challenge the normative codes of representational painting. Party’s lustrous, jewel-toned works skew perspective and expand his fantastical settings beyond the picture plane. The artist’s fascination with the natural world, and the characters that inhabit it, reveal his interest in the art historical legacies of Classical antiquity, Renaissance painting, late nineteenth-century Romanticism, and twentieth-century figurative painting. Party lives in New York.

These programs are free, but space is limited. RSVP is essential.