Natvar Prahladji Bhavsar

India, 1934

BiographyNatvar Bhavsar was born in Gujarat, India, 4/7/1934 and gained his early artistic education at the C.N. School of Art in Ahmedabad. In 1962, Bhavsar left India to further his education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Fine Arts. Since1965, he has been an active member of the New York School of Colorists, producing non-objective art with all-over fields of variegated fluid dense color. To this process, he as brought a uniquely Indian sense of color.
Prior to his arrival in the United States, Bhavsar explored India’s numerous ancient artistic sites and folk and ritual cultures. Two important aspects of this exploration left indelible impressions on him as did a variant of Abstract Expressionism that he saw in India’s museums. Firstly, he studied the cave temples of Ajanta, Ellora and the Sun Temple of Modera. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the visual impact of the Holi and Rangoli festivals, in which vibrantly colored pigments play a central role, inspired him to explore the language of color-field painting. In 1965, Bhavsar’s aesthetic inquiries were recognized when he received a John D. Rockefeller Grant, which launched him into the New York art world. For an exhibition in 1970 at the Max Hutchinson gallery in SoHo, the art critic Carter Ratcliff wrote, “An extraordinary and very new aspect of these canvases is the way a surface will drift to its full dimensions without the ‘justifications’ of color-logic.” Bhavsar’s aesthetic was further endorsed when he was given a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1975.
For Bhavsar, the process of painting is of the utmost significance and his method of working with dry granules of pigment is a very deliberate and precise approach although it may appear random. As the then-director of the Wichita Museum, Kansas said while watching him at work, “…as he moves the screen strainer about over the paper or canvas field, he must control the rhythm of his own body movement.” What emerges are canvases that are deeply pictorial in nature. These monumental paintings, some of them more than 30 feet in length, are lyrical, abstract attempts to reveal both the microcosmic and the macrocosmic universe. The fields appear as drifting color-spaces of indeterminable dimensions akin to cloud-formations or the Milky Way—spatial configurations of dense hues that emanate a spiritual aura. The art critic Christopher Andrae wrote, while reviewing Bhavsar’s Jewish Museum exhibition, “It is expressionism which arises in a strange paradox somewhere between extremely felt sensuousness and extremely felt contemplation. A visual equivalent, perhaps, of eloquent silence.”
Natvar Bhavsar’s paintings are in more than 800 public and private collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. His paintings are included in the university museums of Cornell, Brown, MIT and Delaware. Bhavsar’s work is also featured in many corporate collections, such as AT&T, Exxon, American Express, Swiss Bank, Hilton Hotels, Mobil, NBC and Reader’s Digest Association, Inc. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition, written by Robert C. Morgan, is available from the gallery.
For information, contact Sundaram Tagore, 212-677-4520

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