Natvar Bhavsar
Frieze Masters coincides with ‘The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998’ at the Barbican – the world’s first show to explore this period of cultural upheaval – as well as a major solo display at Tate Britain by Indian artist Balraj Khanna.
Across stand-out solo and curated gallery presentations, this year’s edition of the fair sees a focus on South Asian artists, featuring Nasreen Mohamedi, Balraj Khanna, Maqbool Fida Husain and many more. Together, these exhibitions weave an rich, diverse and expansive history of 1,700 years of South Asian art, with a particular emphasis on the international exchange that underpins much of 20th-century Indian art.
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The curated presentation at Aicon (New York) looks at these decades from across the Atlantic, spotlighting six South Asian artists who travelled to New York between 1963–70, supported by Rockefeller Foundation grants: Natvar Bhavsar, Maqbool Fida Husain, Krishna Shamrao Kulkarni, Ram Kumar, Mohan Samant and Raza. The heady atmosphere of art-making in New York, in which disciplines of painting, poetry, performance and film collided, prompted fundamental change for most artists. Raza appears again, now further into his journey towards abstraction, having abandoned a desire ‘to construct a tangible world’. For other South Asian artists, this time abroad was influential but not catalytic: Husain, who also features in the Barbican exhibition, made a brief foray into abstraction while in New York, but reverted to a more figurative approach upon his return to India.
