Art and Politics by ADMIN

Jamuna, pure pigment on canvas, by Natvar Bhavsar (Image: Asianart.com)

Jamuna, pure pigment on canvas, by Natvar Bhavsar (Image: Asianart.com)

Political language is a tongue, one that is optimally designed to infiltrate both thinking and feeling at the same time. Sarah Hurwitz, speechwriter for Michelle Obama, is a master at getting words to work at all those levels at the same time. Oratory brilliance takes me straight to awe.

Writing about art is strangely similar. When done well it speaks to our cerebral consciousness as well as our emotions, those often inchoate feelings that reside somewhere in our bodies other than our brains. The best writers about art, like the best orators, know how to hit all those spots.

Read the entire article, written by Deborah Barlow for Slow Muse, by clicking here.

artnet Asks: Natvar Bhavsar, Veteran Artist by ADMIN

He's been painting for 50 years, and go for a 1,000 more.

Painter Natvar Bhavsar was born in Gujarat, India, and arrived in the United States in 1962 to study art. Now, over 50 years later, his expansive career is being celebrated at Cara Gallery in New York, with the exhibition “NATVAR BHAVSAR: Five Decades” presenting over 30 paintings and drawings made from the 1960s to the present. Here, we ask this prolific artist to introduce us to his artistic journey and process.

How did your career begin? What brought you to New York?

My life has been filled with unpredictable and unusual events since childhood. My coming to America in 1962 was perhaps the most significant event—as I never thought there was the financial possibility of leaving India to go abroad. A year after my arrival, I received a foreign student scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate school of fine arts, where I had the good fortune of learning about and meeting the most avant-garde creative people of the time. Professor Piero Dorazio, Professor Angelo Savelli—both renowned Italian artists—Otto Piene of the Zero Group, and the architect Louis Kahn were the pioneering leaders of the school.

Upon graduation, I was awarded the John D. Rockefeller III grant. This helped me to begin pursuing my life in art here in New York, since 1965. My first studio in New York at 80 West 3rd Street and was, fortunately, right behind the Judson Church on Washington Square Park. This was where some of the most exciting cultural and political dialogues of the time were happening, where John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Alan Ginsberg, and more interacted through happenings that brought all the arts together, including dancers, writers, and musicians.

Natvar Bhavsae, PR-KRI-TEE III (2011). Courtesy of Cara Gallery.

Natvar Bhavsae, PR-KRI-TEE III (2011). Courtesy of Cara Gallery.

During this period, through Piero Dorazio’s introduction, I was able to meet and develop friendships with many of the major contributors to the art world, including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Adolf Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Clement Greenberg, and many more.

What are some things that inspire you?

Expressive and creative emersion into the process of art-making, observing the eternal flux and abundant visual play in nature, and the gifts left to us by the creative personalities of history through architecture, music, and poetry.

In my expressive moments, I have said that my artistic journey of exploring is akin to my taking a walk in the wilderness.

Describe your creative process. What kinds of patterns, routines, or rituals do you have?
Since my arrival in New York City in 1965, I have maintained, on a daily basis, an uninterrupted, rigorous, and spirited involvement in my creative engagement. This brings me fulfillment and joy, and that freedom in learning through creation and observation has remained at the core of my art.

Now, nearly 50 years later, this uninterrupted flow of painting, emphasizing and exploring the limitless possibilities of color, has led to my works being exhibited continuously since my first exhibition in 1968 on Boston’s Newbury Street.

Navtar Bhavsar, SAMA-LAA (1969). Courtesy of Cara Gallery.

Navtar Bhavsar, SAMA-LAA (1969). Courtesy of Cara Gallery.

What have been some of the most memorable trips you have taken?

Throughout my life, I have traveled with my family to Europe and India to see art at great museums and to visit archeological sites. The caves of Ajanta and Ellora in India (near Aurangabad), which holds art made from 3 BC to 11—painting, sculpture, and architecture—built with support of kings, the mercantile class, and monks. Those artists have remained unnamed, but for me and my family the caves have become our most cherished place to revisit again and again.

My most recent revisits were to Italy and Spain—visiting the Prado was a renewal of my spirit, underlining my eternal hunger for witnessing mastery.  Living in New York, I have chosen to see practically all the major events at the great museums in the city—the Frick, the Morgan, the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, etc. Attending last week’s Frank Stella retrospective at the newly built Whitney brings to my mind a renewed reverence to what I have experienced over the past decades since my arrival in New York. The momentous contribution of Frank’s art represents a great affirmation of his creative agility and courage. These are the blessings to witness of living in this great city of ours.

If you weren’t an artist, what do you think you would be doing?

In many interviews in the past I have expressed my eternal enthusiasm by saying, “I would want to paint for 1,000 years.” I said this about 40 years ago, and I would say the same thing today at 81 years of age.

Which collectors would you most like to collect your work?

Over the span of my creative life, my art has been acquired by individuals who are passionate about experiencing the art. Major corporations for their boardrooms have also acquired many of my artworks.

Although there are a significant number of my artworks acquired by private and corporate collections, the number of museums collections lag behind—I would like to see that change. Also, my birth country India has hardly experienced or collected my art, except for a handful of collectors who have a few of my works. I would like to see that change too.

Read the article on artnet.com.

The Pioneer Painter by ADMIN

Image Courtesy GANT.

Image Courtesy GANT.

Bhavsar, one of the world’s preeminent abstract painters, has changed the way people view both art and those who make it. His work can be found in some 800 collections worldwide, including those of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He has been the recipient of grants from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund and the Guggenheim Foundation. For nearly six decades, the Indian-born
artist has stretched the conventional boundaries of the canvas with his deeply absorbing color-field paintings. At the same time, Bhavsar has challenged notions of national identity in art,
drawing fruitfully from his Indian background but refusing to be defined by it.

Read the entire press release on the Gant website by clicking here.

Run, don't walk, to final days of Natvar Bhavsar Exhibit at Tower49 Gallery, NYC by ADMIN

Janet + Natvar Bhavsar w/Carol Mallory and THEER-A-THEER-A ’70 @Tower 49 RANG RASA exhibition

Janet + Natvar Bhavsar w/Carol Mallory and THEER-A-THEER-A ’70 @Tower 49 RANG RASA exhibition

Recently, I visited New York to see an exhibition of Natvar Bhavsar’s magnificent paintings at the Tower49 Gallery. Natu’s wife, Janet, and I had taught art together in suburban Philadelphia when I first met Natu. The enclosed photo of Janet, Natu and me is taken in front of my favorite canvas of his titled,THEER-A-THEER-A.

Tower 49 Gallery is displaying these splendid works of pure pigments, acrylic and oil mediums on canvas. Rang Rasa (Transcendent Color), is an exhibition of his luminous works shown until March 15. Spanning over forty years, the exhibition comprises seventeen large scale compositions on canvas and six works on paper. His technique of sifting and layering dry pigments over canvases laid on the floor was inspired by Rangoli, a festival ritual in which patterns are designed on the floors of interior and exterior domestic spaces. When Natu describes this process, he recalls memories of Holi, a Hindu holiday in which celebrants douse one another in water infused with brightly colored pigments.

Read the rest of the review at Huffington Post.

New explorations in a Universe of Color by ADMIN

Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal. Natvar Bhavsar with his paintings at FreedmanArt gallery, on the Upper East Side.

Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal. Natvar Bhavsar with his paintings at FreedmanArt gallery, on the Upper East Side.

Natvar Bhavsar uses dry pigment to create large, brilliantly colored, mural-like paintings. Critics often place the Indian-born artist in the context of the genesis of abstract art in America, comparing him with Abstract Expressionists and 'color-field' painters like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But Mr. Bhavsar's method of building up surfaces through layers of dry pigment is his own. Though he harks back to India's classical music and ancient aesthetics, Sanskrit literature and subcontinental seasons as sources of inspiration or fodder for his titles, his approach is modern American, not ethnic Indian.

Read the entire article, written by Vibhuti Patel for the Wall Street Journal, by clicking here.

Abstract Expressionism | Action. Painting. Now by ADMIN

Natvar Bhavsar was born in Gothava, Gujarat, on 7 April 1934. He studied and taught at the Seth C.N. School of Art in Ahmedabad from 1956 to 1959, as well as receiving a degree in English Literature from Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, in 1960. Bhavsar moved to the United States in 1962 and, after receiving his Master of Fine Arts from the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, he settled in New York in 1965. He held his first solo exhibition at Kenmore Gallery, Philadelphia, in 1963, then held regular solo exhibitions at Max Hutchinson Gallery, New York, from 1970 to 1978. He exhibited in Australia at Gallery A, Sydney, in 1970 and 1972. In 1979 a ten-year survey of his work, Color experiences, was organised at the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas and, in 1985, a retrospective of Twenty years of works on paper was held there. In 1981 he was included in the Fifth Triennale, New Delhi, India, and he exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Ahmedabad, and Pundole Art Gallery, Bombay, in 1988. Bhavsar became a US citizen in 1996. He lives and works in New York, travelling to India regularly.

Read more about this exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia by clicking here.

Natvar Bhavsar paintings at Contessa Gallery explore mysteries of matter and spirit through color by ADMIN

Natvar Bhavsar's "Poorna II" (2012) seems to revel in the way color interacts with the eye while also conveying powerful moods and emotions.

Natvar Bhavsar's "Poorna II" (2012) seems to revel in the way color interacts with the eye while also conveying powerful moods and emotions.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- If you're mesmerized by photographs of far-off galaxies and nebulae glowing in the infinite vastness of space, Contessa Gallery in Lyndhurst has a show for you.

Through Sunday, March 18, the gallery is showing an ample survey of paintings by Natvar Bhavsar, a native of the state of Gujarat, India, who established himself in the 1960s in New York and joined the Color Field movement.

Bhavsar doesn't paint astronomical phenomena or anything else literally recognizable, but his paintings evoke notions of sublime vastness and show how artistic materials, properly handled, can celebrate their physicality while also imparting elevated moods, if not a sense of the spiritual.

True to its name, proponents of Color Field painting, including Morris Louis, Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler, created large abstractions that explored the physical properties of paint and the emotional and spiritual qualities of color.

Five decades later, that's still what Bhavsar is doing, and he's doing it very well.

The Contessa exhibition explores a suite of paintings in which Bhavsar sifts clouds of acrylic paint on canvas through screens, achieving soft blooms of color that always seem on the verge of coalescing into something while remaining nebulous and tantalizingly out of reach.

The tension between dissolution and coalescence is part of the allure. But Bhavsar's paintings also simply revel in the way color interacts with the eye while also conveying powerful moods and emotions.

In a large canvas called "Sravanaa," from 2008, Bhavsar lays down a cool, luminous cloud of turquoise and cobalt, which emerge from a field of superheated rust-red. In "Mugdhaa II" (2009), squiggling arabesques in various colors create a carpet of free-flowing, gestural shapes on a field of electric blue.

Bhavsar's paint often looks dry, as if the surfaces of his canvases were crusted with colored sand. At other times, he opts for surfaces with a high shine, evoking baked enamel. At still other times, his surfaces are soft and pebbly, like leather.

Overall, Bhavsar's work occupies a marvelous niche in modern and contemporary art in which East and West meet. It's often noted that Abstract Expressionist painters such as Franz Kline or Mark Tobey were influenced by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. But it's more unusual to see a bridge between American art of the 1950s and '60s, and that of India.

Bhavsar's paintings make the connection seem thoroughly logical. They also bring to mind the Indian festival of Holi, in which people playfully splash each other with colored powder. The festival, observed by Bhavsar as a child, has had a major influence on his work.

Given the apparent simplicity of his paintings, it's easy to feel that you've seen all there is to see in a Bhavsar with the first glance. That's a mistaken assumption.

His work requires long, slow looking. You need to let the paintings work first on your retina and then, ultimately, on your imagination.

Read the entire review by Steven Litt (of the Plain Dealer) by clicking here.

[Singapore Premiere] The Poetics of Color: Natvar Bhavsar, a Painter's Journey by ADMIN

Natvar Bhavsar

It always isn't easy to step out of one's comfort zone in one medium, and then dabble in the craft of another. 5 years in the making, renowned New York based art curator and gallerist Sundaram Tagore (yes, the family name will ring a bell since he's a descendent of the famous poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore) has written and directed a 61 minute documentary film that is touted as the first and only documentary to trace the roots of Asian artists' contributions to contemporary American art. His subject is Indian painter Natvar Bhavsar, tracing his roots from the village of Gothava, India to the bright lights and big city of New York in the 60s, where he had met his wife in an art class, before settling down and being based out of Soho.

But it almost always isn't about Natvar Bhavsar himself as it is about art, so the narrative doesn't play out like a standard biography of a famous artist whom we slowly discover and delve into his personal and professional lives. Tagore didn't intend the film to be this unravelled in this standard way, and told a larger picture that, as a virtuoso in the visual arts, had plenty of more meditative moments as if he had transported the appreciation of art in a gallery, to that similar appreciation put on moving images in a film, where one gazes at, contemplates and forms a subjective opinion that is open to discussion and debate.

Clearly made for those in the art industry, whether the creators or connoisseurs, the film may alienate those who don't appreciate art at a more intellectual level, since the discourse by the field of experts in the film through talking heads styled interviews, with the likes of curators from some of the world's largest museums such as the Guggenheim, may be a monumental task to keep up and to thoroughly understand the inside lingo. However, when Tagore intersperses such moments quite frequently with beautiful cinematography capturing landscapes and especially the art pieces themselves, film viewers go back to familiar ground and inevitably become gazers at the larger picture outside a more focused discussion on art itself.

I felt that some subtitles or intertitles would have been beneficial especially to assist those not up to date with Bhavsar's works, to benefit from being given an additional clue with the title of the art piece to work with, which will in some way assist the viewer to appreciate and evaluate, joining in the fun, through the drawing of conclusions between the art piece, and what it's called. But then again I'm no art expert, so perhaps there are reasons that titles stay hidden, to allow the beauty of the pieces to burst forward instead. Being a first film, Tagore's inexperience can sometimes be spotted through recycled montage slices in the beginning used to set the stage, but once the film dealt with the subject matters close to his heart, his comfort and experience with the source materials naturally took over and this confidence shows as the film progresses.

This is both literally and figuratively an art film, and one that is rich in its imagery and reliance of those powerful images to tell a story. The film is now making its rounds in the festival circuit, and if you're up for some enlightenment and exposure into an aspect of the art industry, or to know more about Natvar Bhavsar the painter himself, then perhaps this hour long documentary could be the point to jump start that interest from.

Sundaram Tagore himself was present today to grace the Singapore Premiere at Sinema Old School, as well as to partake in a Q&A session with the audience.

Read the article on (A Nutshell) Review by clicking here.

Interview with Time Out Hong Kong by ADMIN

Time Out Hong Kong

Ahead of his first Hong Kong exhibition, the world-renowned abstract expressionist and colour field pioneer tells Mary Agnew about making it in New York, hanging with Rothko and Pollock, and the search for ectasy.

On the phone from his home studio in New York's SoHo, the celebrated abstract expressionist and pioneer of colour field painting, 75-year-old Natvar Bhavsar, whispers deep insights into a time of tremendous art exploration and development. As an Indian immigrant artist Bhavsar quickly became a contemporary and friend of the likes of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman and a staple figure within the creative community of his newly found artistic homeland. His soft-spoken stories, much like his paintings, are bathed in the romantic light of a gold era.

Read the entire article here.

A Master's Stroke by ADMIN

When Stephen Snowball sat down to interview Natvar Bhavsar, a celebrated artist of Indian origin, little did he realize that it would be a journey in self-exploration. His musings...

For a second let's forget his longstanding presence in New York City's most prestigious galleries. For a minute, set aside his long list of international tours and even longer list of esteemed accolades. Let's even put off our mind, for a moment, the fact that artist Natvar Bhavsar has been painting with passion and promise since, with the restless hands of youth, he first picked up a paintbrush as a child.

Read the rest of Stephen Snowball's Friday Magazine, Gulf News, article here.

Breaking into the Global Art Market by ADMIN

The long-awaited world premiere of aptly called The Poetics of Color, a documentary on the life of the now 75 year old Natvar Bhavsar, the great Indian painter colorist, took place at the packed SVA Theater several days ago, amid much excitement in the Chelsea movie house. The crowd was made up of people who’d read the many articles on his life and work and those who had not. The audience loved the gentle painter.

They also loved the talented writer and director of the film, international gallerist, Sundaram Tagore, who has galleries in New York, Beverly Hills, and Hong Kong. He made his film debut presenting this painter in the documentary medium, his first time doing it and directing a film. The cognoscenti of the New York art community were in the theater being heard having scholarly chitchat about Tagore and about Bhavsar, who was there with his American wife, who’d come with him from India to New York to a Soho loft to get Bhavsar’s career really going.

It was a good match, Bhavsar and very articulate and scholarly Tagore who is intellectually talented almost as much as his great uncle, Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

The 60-minutes Poetics of Color, shown at the SVA Theater by the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council was for its 10th Annual Arts Council Film Festival in New York. The Festival had the support of Mahindra & Mahindra, a $6 billion Indian manufacturer of tractors, a global business and serious promoter of Indian culture in America. Mahindra Film Festival, in 2007, U.S. screened brilliant Slumdog Millionaire directed by Danny Boyle, which won an Oscar for best picture in 2009; for Boyle an Oscar for best director. The Festival may give Poetics of Color and Tagore “legs” to race to the top too. It has made a bet on Bhavsar. Artists can’t become great if a marketing machine isn’t behind them to sustain their development.

Tagore, filmmaker and marketer, said, “Bhavsar’s paintings are in more than 800 public and private collections, including those of the Guggenheim, Metropolitan, Whitney museums. He is certainly running with Bhavsar to push him to the topof the art market — “this Tibetian-like mandala painter.” Bhavsar’s huge canvases, upon which dry sifted pigments of paint “are thrown” and worked until they are transformed into the creations he’s conceived in his mind. The results are comparable to the highly creative, highly artistic, great, black “paint throwing” of Jackson Pollack. Bhavsar’s “throwing” of his dry, multicolored paints on his canvases is different, of beautiful reds and blues, beautifully mixed — exotic visually; a unique craft, art.
Tagore was clever to open a gallery in Hong Kong, the third largest art-auction market in the world but behind London, the second largest; behind New York, the largest (the Wall Street Journal reported New York sales for 2010 was $1.1 billion).

Tagore has a gallery in Asia’s culture capital that has plenty of money to market Asian art robustly globally. He is a niche marketer, perfect for rich India, which is a strong Asian culture. He has muscle, clout to sell Indian artists worldwide. His polished English, his Oxford doctoral candidacy, his confidence, his popularity as a sought-after art history lecturer are ideal talents for him to sell Indian art in the hottest global markets. Can he take his beautiful Poetics of Color to the same heights dazzling Slumdog Millionaire reached or at least make it as popular worldwide?

American “Scholastic Press” was not known to be a fiction publisher, not until its Levine Books got hold of J.K. Rowling’s young adult, teen novel “Harry Potter” and niche marketed it so stunningly that the super publishers were aghast. No fiction publishing like what Levine Books did for “Harry Potter” has ever taken place — 400 million copies sold worldwide. The movies made from the “Harry Potter” series have made this intellectual property a $24 billion brand — and Rowling a billionaire. That’s what genius global niche marketing can do even for intellectual property.

Read the entire article on Huffington Post, written by Norman Darden, by clicking here.

Alternate Worlds: Natvar Bhavsar by ADMIN

NatvarBhavsar

Natvar Bhavsar's Expressionist Art offers a spiritual portal to colourful aura's and parallel universes. The prolific artist's expansive, mind-altering pieces are the impetus for self-examination, and to search for truth in lieu of meaning, his first exhibition in Hong Kong, at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery, entitled 'Rang' is sanskrit for both a surge of colour and achieving a state of pure ectasy.

Read the entire article in Kee magazine here.

Rainbow in Translation by ADMIN

Closing this week at Sundaram Tagore’s Hong Kong space is the first East Asian retrospective of Natvar Bhavsar, a famed Indian artist who made his career in New York and his name in Venice.  I must agree with the acquisition curators of major museums around the globe: his work is stunning.   It is at once immediate and meditative, and refreshingly bereft of conceptual conceit.

Read More

Rang: Sundaram Tagore Gallery by ADMIN

Natvar Bhavsar, best known for his pure-pigment paintings, says colours are like sounds that reverberate with rhythm. The New York-based Indian artist says that over the past 50 years he has created art that investigates the 'power and possibilities" of colour.

"I believe that colours emanate silence and poetic reverberations," he says. "They contain an unfathomably rich visual poetry. Through the patient exploration of colour, I have been rewarded with countless rhythms".

Read the entire article in the South China Morning Post here.

Bhavsar among biggest names at Venice Biennale by ADMIN

Janet and Natvar Bhavsar

Does the 53rd Venice Biennale mark the end of art? Most critics have damned it, while recognizing it as the biggest event - in size, noise and money - of the art fraternity of the world. Beyond the hoopla at the annual extravanganza was an exhibition where Gujarat-born New Yorker Natvar Bhavsar was among the biggest names.

Read the entire article, written by Jyotirmoy Datta for DESI Talk by clicking here.

Natvar Bhavsar's cosmos by ADMIN

Abdhee

Abdhee

'You don't see things as they are. You see things as you are,' says the Talmud and this could, perhaps, describe Natvar Bhavsar's paintings.

This one thing, 'color' has myriad, noetic images in Bhavsar's work. His imposing work is like entering grand cathedrals, hue saturated monuments. This art is not a doorway to something, it is complete in itself. There are no direct religious overtones and it is essential to see, to actually view, his work. Copies and photographs do not convey his overwhelming experiments and great perception of color. No dilettante-like talk of tints, textures and wavelengths of light can show this skilled baring of energy and monumental, weighty creativity. Like Pollock, his paintings are impossible to copy and prints do not transmit their raw majesty.

Read the article, written by Swapna Vora, by clicking here.

Natvar Bhavsar by ADMIN

Natvar Bhavsar, "SATVAA I" (2003), Pure color pigment on canvas. Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery.

Natvar Bhavsar, "SATVAA I" (2003), Pure color pigment on canvas. Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery.

I first met Natvar Bhavsar in 1980 at his exhibition at the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas. I was familiar with Bhavsar’s paintings in New York during my graduate student days at New York University, but to see a major exhibition in Wichita by this Indian painter whose work I had admired at Max Hutchinson Gallery in SoHo was an undeniable thrill. I still remember how the paintings felt—the immense scale, the vibrant color, the bursting sensation of cosmic joy—all embedded with these magical surfaces. It was like a visualization of the Bhagavad Gita—like the struggle and synthesis between Brahma and Atman. The exhibition in Wichita was a true sensation— true, in the sense, that it transmitted something real, something beyond the fray of art school painting, something I could feel and embody and remember. To know is to remember—and this was precisely the nature of the experience in relation to Natvar Bhavsar’s paintings at that moment in time.

More recently, Bhavsar showed some of his recent smaller paintings at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery on Greene Street. Normally, Bhavsar shows paintings of an immense scale—a scale that perpetrates a feeling of Hindu cosmology where the viewer enters into the universe of a sensibility that merges thought with sensation, dream with reality, nuance with literalness. Memory is important in spite of the assumptions about cynicism that have become de rigueur since the days of postmodernism. At the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in SoHo, I experienced an exhibition of canvases by Bhavsar where the density of color literally burst from the center of the painting outward with sinuous tendrils that wove through space at the edges of an ovoid. Yet Bhavsar is not about color field painting. He was never really associated with artists like Noland, Frankenthaler, Olitski, and Louis, even in the late sixties when his immigrant career in New York began.

The titles of Bhavsar’s paintings are all in Sanskrit—"Aarakh," "Mangalaa," Alokaa," and "Satvaa." All the words express subtle variations of emotion. What I respond to in these paintings is precisely that— the subtle variations of feeling. As I entered the back room of the Tagore Gallery, I was confronted with a predominantly gold-ochre painting, entitled "Mangalaa." The common meaning of the word in Hindi refers to a social ritual in which acknowledgement of success or good-tidings is offered to the honored guest. "Alokaa" refers to a world that is beyond comprehension, a transcendent world not given to immanence alone, nor related to the mundane world of materialism. As for the paintings where these titles are given, the sense of being in the presence of another cosmos where pigment is the signifying element can be exhilarating.

Natvar Bhavsar’s paintings hold a remarkable consistency, but this is not to suggest that they are beyond change or beyond the effect of transition from one stage to another. Rather it is to suggest that the emotional respondent is given to color. And that color is the trajectory and the expedient conduit by which emotions are felt and somehow endured over time, over the temporal history in which painting is preserved and understood and assimilated into the stratosphere of linguistic meaning, and thus, given to the cosmos not as an effect but as a source of meaning. What Bhavsar’s paintings achieve is a remarkable intimacy that leads us into the present fusion of language, technology, and the transmission of form. They represent the most unequivocal resolution of amorphous Being. This paradox of meaning is an Indian intervention into the stasis of cynicism that remains on the bleak shorelines of Western culture.

Read the entire review on the Brooklyn Rail, written by Robert C. Morgan by clicking here.