January 10 - February 15, 2009
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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Like Pollock [Natvar Bhavsar's] paintings are impossible to copy and prints do not transmit their raw majesty.
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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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"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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"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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"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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"...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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"...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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"...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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"...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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"[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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