NATVAR BHAVSAR
Born 1934 in Gothaya, India.
Lives and works in New York City.
Claiming 'color' as his medium, Natvar Bhavsar has explored the sensual, emotional, and intellectual resonance of color for over 50 years. Bhavsar has exhibited widely in New York, where he has been a longtime resident and central figure in the art world – one of the few remaining original artists from the SoHo school – and with a variety of international galleries and museums. His paintings evoke influences from his childhood in India – surrounded by vivid textiles, practicing rangoli, witnessing the Holi Festival – and his adulthood in 1970s New York City.
The immediacy of Bhavsar's art results from the controlled spontaneity of his process. The works are constructed using dry pigment that is often sifted, poured, or otherwise dispersed onto prepared surfaces. The dry pigment is a direct physical and spiritual link to the artist's connection with India. Each gesture marks a specific distance from the work's surface, a particular density of color, and a measured movement of the body. The resultant surface is grainy and made up of a density of color in varying tones. For Bhavsar, the goal of his paintings is "to release the energies that colors have locked within them, and to produce a continuum of energies that expands beyond the pictures limit."
Born 1934 in Gujarat, India.
Lives and works in New York City.
Claiming 'color' as his medium, Natvar Bhavsar has explored the sensual, emotional, and intellectual resonance of color for over 50 years. Bhavsar has exhibited widely in New York, where he has been a longtime resident and central figure in the art world – one of the few remaining original artists from the SoHo school – and with a variety of international galleries and museums. His paintings evoke influences from his childhood in India – surrounded by vivid textiles, practicing rangoli, witnessing the Holi Festival – and his adulthood in 1970s New York City.
The immediacy of Bhavsar's art results from the controlled spontaneity of his process. The works are constructed using dry pigment that is often sifted, poured, or otherwise dispersed onto prepared surfaces. The dry pigment is a direct physical and spiritual link to the artist's connection with India. Each gesture marks a specific distance from the work's surface, a particular density of color, and a measured movement of the body. The resultant surface is grainy and made up of a density of color in varying tones. For Bhavsar, the goal of his paintings is "to release the energies that colors have locked within them, and to produce a continuum of energies that expands beyond the pictures limit."
Natvar Bhavsar, AASO, 1989, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 90 x 77 in (228.6 x 195.58 cm)
Natvar Bhavsar, AHEERA, 1987, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 90 x 77 in (228.6 x 195.58 cm)
Natvar Bhavsar, AKSHYAA, 1992-93, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 66 x 90 in (167.64 x 228.6 cm)
Natvar Bhavsar, SAMANAA, 2000, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 80 x 68 in (203.2 x 172.72 cm)
Natvar Bhavsar, MANJAREE II, 1996, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 78 x 57.5 in (198.12 x 146.05 cm)
Natvar Bhavsar, VERGAA, 1973-2004, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 44 x 108 in (111.76 x 274.32 cm)
Natvar Bhavsar, AMER, 1977, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 57 x 66 in
Natvar Bhavsar, ARCHAN, 1980, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 74 x 68.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, ARCHAN III, 1980, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 74 x 68.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, AMBHI II, 1983, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 74 x 68.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, BEGIN, 1968, Pigments and acrylic medium on linen, 97.5 x 144 in
Natvar Bhavsar, SAMBHAV, 2015, Oil on canvas, 66 x 57 in
Natvar Bhavsar, SAUMYA XVII (RED), 2016, Oil on canvas, 25 x 23 in
Natvar Bhavsar, SAUMYA XVIII, 2016, Oil on canvas, 25 x 23 in
Natvar Bhavsar, VASANT, 2015, Oil on canvas, 47.5 x 41.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, ANANG, 2014, Oil on canvas, 40 x 38 in
Natvar Bhavsar, AGAT, 2015, Oil on canvas, 47.5 x 45.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, R-DHYA, 1972, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on canvas, 96 x 96 in
Natvar Bhavsar, UNTITLED II, 1968, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on paper, 45 x 50.25 in
Natvar Bhavsar, UNTITLED III, 1968, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on paper, 43 x 52 in
Natvar Bhavsar, UNTITLED IX, 1971, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on paper, 53 x 42 in
Natvar Bhavsar, UNTITLED XVIII, 1973, Dry pigments with oil and acrylic mediums on paper, 48 x 39 in
Natvar Bhavsar, ANTARAA V, 2003, Oil on canvas, 40 x 13.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, GUNTHAN, 2005, Oil on canvas, 40 x 13.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, GUNTHAN II, 2005, Oil on canvas, 38.5 x 16.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, SOONDER, 2011, Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 55.5 in
Natvar Bhavsar, SAMAGRA, 2014, Oil on canvas, 54 x 54 in
Natvar Bhavsar, VEEJYAA, 2015, Oil on canvas, 52 x 48 in
Natvar Bhavsar, ANANT II, 2015, Oil on canvas, 49 x 32 in
Natvar Bhavsar, ANANT III, 2015, Oil on canvas, 49 x 32 in
From 4th-century Hindu sculpture to modernist photography, discover the South Asian artists who revolutionized creative culture at home and abroad.
“I have felt from the very start of my art education that the excitement by color was by itself for me, uplifting. There was something very direct and biological about it, which engulfed me in a way…. What I was trying to express was that the color has given me charge to use it as completely, like in music, as the sound becomes a vehicle for creating a universe.”
The impressive side by side solo exhibitions work together, not apart. A love of deep color isn't all the artists have in common at Aicon.
The difficulty of having a show during this time is that the atrocities in the world today make it difficult to have any kind of celebration while so many around the world find themselves in mourning, but I suppose that revelation is a continuous need. I wish that people could come and enjoy it with me but I understand that that's not possible at the moment.
Aicon Art New York brought us through Natvar Bhavsar: Beginnings (March 1-April 6, 2019) an astonishing show on this Indian-American artist’s early color-field paintings. Now, by giving us Natvar Bhavsar: Sublime Light from September 26-October 31, 2020, the gallery is spotlighting his paintings from the late 1970s through the 1980s.
"There’s something about the sonorousness of the language and the richness of his color fields that connects somehow. Overall, Bhavsar’s works bring out color’s metaphysical aspects and, via his use of raw pigment, its profound physicality."
"Bhavsar is at once a thoroughly American painter and product of Indian culture, the deeper meanings and values of which have not left him. Never, as he approaches the divine, does he lose touch with the richly cross-cultural experience that has formed him. A Bhavsar painting is immediately recognizable as his."
Aicon Art Gallery will exhibit the debut solo exhibition of the early work of octogenarian New York Indian American artist Natvar Bhavsar, ‘Beginnings.’
Doyle New York’s November 13, 2012 auction of Modern and Contemporary Art auction presented a wide range of paintings and sculpture by some of the 20th and 21st centuries' most prominent artists. Works by American, European, Latin American and Asian artists encompassed artistic movements from Cubism and Expressionism through the present day. The sale set another world auction record for the Indian/American artist Natvar Bhavsar (b. 1934) when a large abstract from 2000 titled Sundervana sold for a record $53,125 against an estimate of $20,000-30,000.