Victoria Miro is delighted to present Looking Outwards to Look Inwards, a three-person exhibition of paintings by Etel Adnan, Milton Avery and Ilse D’Hollander.

This exhibition features three artists whose lives spanned the twentieth century, working across different generations and geographies yet united by their distilled observations of place and the journeys that inspired them.

None of the paintings on view were made en plein air; the artists inhabited and experienced landscapes only to draw on them from memory back in the studio. In their canvases, the living landscape is translated into simplified, sometimes geometric, though always intensely charged passages of colour.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay, entitled Landscape and Abstraction, by Christopher Riopelle, Curator, National Gallery, London.

  • ‘Each paints vivid abstractions which nonetheless invite us to dream of those vistas we are yet to discover.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Milton Avery

    One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Milton Avery (1885-1965) pursued an independent and steadfast course throughout his career. Drawing imagery from the world around him, in particular the landscapes and people he loved, his art is as intimate and accessible as it is towering in its ambition and achievement. With his focus on simplified forms and use of colour as a primary means of expression, in the 1930s Avery profoundly influenced and won the devotion of fellow US artists including future abstract expressionists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. Yet, while seeking to express an idea in its simplest form, Avery never sought pure abstraction for himself. Above all, he is an artist who resists categorisation. 'I never have any rules to follow,' he stated, 'I follow myself.'
  • Milton Avery, Bird in Evening Sky, 1963
    Milton Avery, Bird in Evening Sky, 1963
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    ‘In Bird in Evening Sky the American doyen of abstract landscape, Milton Avery animates a broad-brushed skyscape with an angular abstract avian form.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Milton Avery, Fishing Bird, 1962
    Milton Avery, Fishing Bird, 1962
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    ‘Birds, boats and trees can animate an otherwise abstract canvas in unexpected ways, adding a visual tension that draws the viewer toward greater, more complicated feats of interpretation.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Milton Avery, Dancing Trees, 1955
    Milton Avery, Dancing Trees, 1955
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    ‘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 colour and pattern.’

    – Milton Avery

  • Etel Adnan

    Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925 and died in Paris, France, in 2021. An acclaimed poet, novelist and artist, she began painting in her thirties and gained widespread recognition as a visual artist through her inclusion in Documenta 13 in 2012. Adnan developed a distinct visual language, one rooted in colour, form and intuition, as her abstract paintings sought to capture the essence of land, sea, sky and cosmos. She revered nature and believed that its power was revealed through colour. She described painting as an impulsive act, completing each work in a single sitting, working indoors and entirely from memory. Laying the stretched canvas flat, like a page on a table, she applied oil paint directly with a palette knife, creating planes of colour that convey a placeless landscape from afar and reveal a brilliant intensity upon close observation.
  • Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2013
    Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2013
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    ‘Etel Adnan juxtaposed brilliantly coloured geometric forms to evoke with bracing succinctness the eternal landscape verities of sun, sea and sky.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017
    Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017
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    ‘Tranquil, storm-tossed, sublime – it is intriguing how often abstract paintings can be described in the same terms as landscapes.’ 

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017
    Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2017
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    ‘Colours exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical beings, like the attributes of God exist as metaphysical entities.’ 

    – Etel Adnan

  • Ilse D’Hollander

    In her short life, Ilse D’Hollander (1968–1997) created an intelligent, sensual and highly resonant body of work. Her often small-scale canvases and works on paper are charged with references to the everyday. Yet, enlivened by an expressive, economical touch, her work resonates just as strongly as a sustained, self-reflexive enquiry into the act of painting. D’Hollander drew upon her impressions and experience of place, particularly the Flemish countryside where she spent the last, highly productive years of her life. While alluding to objects and places in the world, as well as specifics of temperature and light, D’Hollander’s paintings are seldom immediately recognisable as straightforward landscapes. Rather, they can be read as a series of accumulated impressions, adjustments and layerings – a visual record of the artist’s thought processes. 
  • Ilse D'Hollander, Untitled, 1989
    Ilse D’Hollander, Untitled, 1989
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    ‘Ilse D’Hollander used freely gestural painting, her dominant brushstrokes evoking the lyrically flat landscape of her native Flanders.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Ilse D'Hollander, Untitled, 1995
    Ilse D’Hollander, Untitled, 1995
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    ‘This rich dialogue between landscape and abstract painting is ongoing. Large areas of colour, jagged lines criss-crossing surfaces, radical juxtapositions of forms pertain to both.’

    – Christopher Riopelle

  • Ilse D'Hollander, Untitled, 1996
    Ilse D'Hollander, Untitled, 1996
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    ‘A painting comes into being when ideas and the act of painting coincide… My being is present in my action on the canvas.’

     
    – Ilse D’Hollander

  • Landscape and Abstraction

    By Christopher Riopelle

    → Read here

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