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ARTIST ARCHIVE
Natvar Bhavsar
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Themes: abstract, pigment Review: All of the Natvar Bhavsar's works, created in the last 39 years are non-objective and the artist has been classified as a lyrical abstractionist. The artist finds working with form so traumatic and limiting that he liberates himself by avoiding articulate forms and precise events. Bhavsar wrote of his painting, "it is similar to dance and music as we submerge ourselves into them without really trying to analyse their meaning." Although several American modernist painters such as Robert Motherwell, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland and Jule Olitzki were very influential for the development of his art, the roots of his style and technique go back to his formatives years in India. The technique he currently employs in creating his lyrical abstractions was derived from a traditional folk painting technique known as Rangoli, a kind of festive holiday ritual by which Hindus throw pure powdered color onto the ground to create decorative forms. On this uniqueness of his art, the well known art critic and art historian, Carter Ratcliff wrote that "Bhavsar makes the surface of the locale for the complex materiality of his colour, and it partakes of that materiality. It reveals itself fully, without drawing on any of modernism's prepared notion of the surface. Bhavsar's freedom from the idealist (even occult) values of formalism, of anti- and post-formalism makes it impossible to align him with any of those segments of the New York art world." The most distinctive aspects in his paintings that have attracted the critics' attention are subtle nuances in color relationships and the sense of tranquil but vital presence of the composition. Howard E. Wooden wrote of these compelling elements, "his works fully embody an unworldly quality, a quality of eternal duration and at the same time one of spiritual ascension, of stillness within the context of ongoing movement." The folder of this artist in the AAAC Archives includes 14 slides, invitation cards, a catalog with color plates and reviews and essays written by numerous critics and curators. -- Reviewed by Young Park | |||||||||
