Natvar Bhavsar
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AICON
Frieze Masters, Booth D11
With works by Natvar Bhavsar, Maqbool Fida Husain, Krishna Shamrao Kulkarni, Ram Kumar, Sayed Haider Raza, and Mohan Samant
John D. Rockefeller founded the Asian Cultural Council in 1963 to fund fellowships for artists from across Asia, inviting them to spend a year in New York City. For the Indian artists whose works are on view at New York gallery Aicon’s booth, the grant would come to have a profound influence, which in turn would have a major impact on the trajectory of Indian art in the 20th century.
“Most of them had not traveled outside India,” said owner Prajit Dutta. “So the opportunity to spend a year in New York, getting to meet people like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning at the height of their powers—several of these artists talked about how profoundly changed their practice, and some of them essentially became the founders of modern Indian art.”
Sayed Haider Raza, for instance, one of India’s leading modernist painters, arrived in New York as a painter of landscapes and came back as an “abstractionist painting in acrylic.” His work at the booth, Untitled (1970), provides a prime example.
Framed in this way, and featuring works by some of the leading names in 20th-century Indian art, the booth offers a fascinating historical perspective on a group of artists that are currently receiving reappraisal both in India and internationally. Works are priced from $45,000 up to the “seven figures.”
—Arun Kakar
