"Natvar Bhavsar, best know 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. In his latest exhibition, RANG, opening at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery next Wednesday, he further explores the subtle energy of colours"
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"Among the biggest names at Fortuny was Bhavsar, the only Indian painter who finds a place besides that of old and modern masters in any serious European view of world art."
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Natvar Bhavsar's painting ABDHEE 2006 from a private European collection, will be exhibited in the exhibition IN-FINITUM at Museo Fortuny in Venice during the Venice Biennale.
The infinite
Questioning 'infinity' is a spiritual journey. The human condition strives for perfection, hungers to be in pursuit of completion. On this quest for the imperceptible, the unimaginable, the incomprehensible, man gets confronted with his boundaries and struggles with what is unachievable. It is in this part of incompleteness that the infinite resides, the void, the recipient and source of the all and everything, of the none and nothing. The infinite as a never-ending road to completion, knowledge and enlightenment has inspired intellectuals, artists, scientists and literati since the beginning of reasoning times. Their discoveries and writings, artistic impressions and thoughts will shape another segment of the In-finitum exhibition.
http://www.museiciviciveneziani.it/frame.asp?pid=1710&musid=196&sezione=mostre
. . . He [Natvar Bhavsar] was also awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1975. His 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."
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Visitors at Art Dubai congregate at Urpaana, a 2004 panting by Indian artist Natvar Bhavsar.
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By HOLLAND COTTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/arts/design/30mind.html
"The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989," a strange and often beautiful show at the Guggenheim, offers glimpses of familiar artists, but also lots of strangers.
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By Emily Waldorf
Natvar Bhavsar's mesmerizing exhibition, Rang, just opened at the Beverly Hills Sundaram Tagore gallery and is well worth a visit. Bhavsar's large scale paintings are bold, bright, beautiful and reminiscent of the abstract expressionists and color field painters of yore but with an undeniably original Indian influence. In order to achieve his signature style, Bhavsar carefully and deliberately sifts layers of pure pigment powder onto canvas using different tools such as sieves and screens. Bhavsar's work draws the viewer in, commanding serious contemplation. After a few minutes you can almost feel rich textiles, constellations and cloud-like patterns emerging from the mesmerizing layers of thick color.
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Like Pollock [Natvar Bhavsar's] paintings are impossible to copy and prints do not transmit their raw majesty.
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"The latest edition comes in the form of Sundaram Tagore [Gallery], a bright space filled with vibrant contemporary works personally selected by it's namesake, a notable New York-based curator and descendant of influential poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore."
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"Bhavsar's paintings are in the tradition of great art through the ages...The roller-coaster of the art market might induce us to lose sight of the varieties of art. 'RANG: Natvar Bhavsar' will restore the balance."
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"...Less-colour-saturated but no less intuitive are the pieces by Natvar Bhavsar, who sprinkles pigment delicately on his canvases in an echo of Jackson Pollock, although the works' understated quality reflects a gentle Asian sensibility that's the opposite of the American painter's frenetic, ego-driven style..."
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"Tagore's Galleries in New York, Los Angeles and now Hong Kong combine visual arts with other forms such as poetry reading, dance performances, music, films and charity funding."
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"Tagore explains how his passion for art has enabled him to dissolve differences in cultures and bring them together in a unique and creative way, denoting that art can transcend all culture and social standings."
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"Gallerist Sundaram Tagore said, "All these artists have spent their lives working in and exploring different Eastern and Western cultures - including India, China, Nepal, Japan, Italy, Holland and America. Together they create an incredible mosaic and foster an intercultural dialogue that reflects a diversity of thought and artistic style."
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"The Indian art market just took off about five years ago and has really heated up even further in the last two," says Sundaram Tagore, who has galleries in New York and Beverly Hills, as well as a Hong Kong branch slated to open this month. In addition to demand from the Indian diaspora and Indian collectors, Tagore says, part of the growth has been fueled by American corporations with expanding businesses in India and China.
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"Among the returning dealers is New York's Sundaram Tagore Gallery, which is bringing a selection of richly hued abstractions, priced between $25,000 and $250,000, by the likes of Natavar Bhavsar and Hiroshi Senju, who were born in Gujurat, India, and Tokyo, respectively."
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"...works by artists such as M.F. Husain and Raza are commanding a million dollars and higher."
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"Three Indian artists are among those featured in Inner Journey, the latest offering from the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York."
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"...Senju expresses contemporary modernity through ancient painting techniques unique to Japan."
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"One does not merely look at a Bhavsar work, one is transported by it. It is as if the artist has bottled up the night sky, dusted it in poweder pigment and cast it out in great dreamlike bursts. The result is a textured canvas that pulses with dimension; grainy up close, smooth and wispy from afar."
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"Yet the absence of recognizable imagery in his work aligns Mr. Bhavsar more with American traditions of abstract art, and in particular color field painting; one is reminded variously of the work of the American painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Jules Olitski."
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"Bhavsar's imagery conjures cosmic impressions, like nebulae expanding in a brilliant dance of colored light or stars mingling in a gravitational waltz through space."
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"The artist gets a remarkable range out of the method, producing big, star-studded Milky Ways on indigo backgrounds, swirling smile storms, pimply white surfaces that look like clotted cream, and floating lozenges of color, usually a square centered on a contrasting color, that remind you of Mark Rothko."
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"...With the opening of a comprehensive show of 50 or more paintings spanning four decades of the work of Indian-born New York artist Natvar Bhavsar in the special gallery of its Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, became the first university in the country to host such a solo show (March 11 - July 22) by an artist of South Asian Descent..."
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"...It is not that there are just layers and layers of pigments, some dispersed by the flow of air in Bhavsar's Greene Street loft studio - not just 80 layers as Kwint said, but as many as 200 - but there are meanings too deep for ordinary cognition, meanings too ancient and new, bizarre and supremely rational, for us even to try and put into words..."
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"Dubai is at the crossroads of the east and west, and it is taking charge as one of the great centres of commerce, tourism, and art"
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"Tagore is an art historian, curator and founder of the Sundaram Tagore Gallery based in Chelsea, which is the hottest, most happening place for contemporary art in New York."
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"...Bhavsar's paintings are not limited to their surface colors - which are indefinable, suffused as they are with additional tones such as violet, saffron, rose, vermillion, cinnamon, midnight blue, and emerald, tinged warm and cool. Thier surfaces can resemble smoke when the hues evanesce, or they can be more tangible, pebbled textures and raised patterns, edged in a flame motif..."
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"The California artist Lee Waisler came to know both the renowned Indian philosopher J. Krishnamuri and the indophile artist Beatrice Wood, a lover of Marcel Duchamp, who inspired the character of Rose in the mainstream American film Titanic"
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"...The gallery, always interested in cross-cultural connections, has shown a diverse group of artists including Natvar Bhavsar, Sohan Qadri, Judith Murray, Nathan Slate Joseph, Anil Revri and Susan Weil..."
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"Bhavsar, Qadri, and Revri, are symbolic of the journeys of the artists of our times. Geographically, they have traveled out the country of their birth; artisically out of the influence of the Modernism of Matisse and Picasso, the Abstractionism of Mondrian, the Lyric Abstractionism of Pollock."
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"Fabulous art in a taxi garage? Sundaram Tagore a descendant of the illustrious Tagore family, himself an art historian, collector and connoisseur moved from his big gallery in Soho to an even bigger space - a 100-year-old garage in Chelsea."
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"The goal . . . is to create a dialogue among cultures and to find points of commonality and elements that inspire new ways of thinking and creating...Curated by Sundaram Tagore"
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"...Natvar Bhavsar is a color field painter who works in pure pigment. He is largely credited for bringing a spiritual element to the absrtact expressionism movement in America..."
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"After spending years in Soho, Sundaram Tagore Gallery has finally made the move to Chelsea, one of the art capitals of the world."
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"...The two things that stand out about Bhavsar's works are the colors and the sizes, both bold and magnificent. While critics noticed similarities between the size of his works and those of Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothco and Barnett Newman, none of these art greats were able to capture the color he was exposed to in his youth in India..."
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"Bhavsar works with dried granules of pigment in a very deliberate and precise approach, although it may appear random. What emerges are canvases that are deeply pictorial in nature. Some of his paintings are monumental--more than 30 feet in length--and lyrical, abstract attempts to reveal both the microcosmic and the macrocosmic universe."
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"Sundaram Tagore Gallery has announced that they will relocate to a new space at 547 West 27th Street in Chelsea and inaugurate their new gallery with a show of Natvar Bhavsar to open on March 16, 2006."
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"But the first show of Indian contemporary art in the fair's history, from newcomer Sundaram Tagore of New York, also reflects heightened interest in that field Tagore has meditative paintings on paper by Sohan Qadri.."
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"Natvar Bhavsar is a world-renowned painter from India whose huge colorful canvases hang in more than 1,000 private, corporate and museum collections including the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.."
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"...Bhavsar has completely demolished appearance and form and contour - nor is there any place for 'line' in the world of color-drunk Bhavsar"
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"[Sundaram Tagore] A gallery owner and curator explains diaspora culture from an artistic perspective - and highlights the responsibilities of the émigré Indian artist today"
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"What Bhavsar's paintings achieve is a remarkable intimacy that leads us into the present fusion of language, technology, and the transmission of form."
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"[Natvar Bhavsar] became a witness to, and a participant in, the great cultural flowering of our time - in dance, music, and painting."
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"...Natvar Bhavsar creates large compositions in which a cosmic vision emerges from lush materiality."
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"A recognition of [Bhavsar's] place in the mainstream art world today was the release on Oct. 15 of a book on Bhavsar, written by a noted authority on American art, irving Sandler, and published by Craftsman House of Australia, at a reception at the home of noted art collectors Pat and Ben Heller, ...titled "Natvar Bhavsar: Painting and the Reality of Color," contain[ing] 42 plates of color that reproduce the complexities and nuances of the original, which ordinarily elude reproduction, with notable fidelity."
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"[Bhavar's] work occupies a unique place in mainstream contemporary art. It is distinguished by what is described as its "materiality." It is not figurative. It doesn't tell a story, nor communicate any idea. It contains no drama; it doesn't prove any point, preaches no moral. It is just there, by itself, existing all alone."
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"He is a masterful draftsman and was trained in India in an academic tradition. But colour is his thing. Although he has done figurative work and also went through a cubist phase, there has been an increasing de-emphasis on drawing in his work and a corresponding emphasis on colour. If you have to classify him, his is an abstract expressionist but his work is unique. They always remind me of the state of mind just before you awaken from a dream."
-Howard Wooden-
Director of the Wichita Art Musuem in Texas
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