Natvar Bhavsar
LAYAA XI,
2013
Pure Pigment on Canvas
34 1/2 × 32 1/2 in
Claiming that colors are his medium, influential Color Field painter Natvar Bhavsar has been exploring the sensual, emotional, and intellectual resonance of color since the early 1960s. His paintings evince influences from his childhood in India, surrounded by vivid textiles, practicing rangoli, and witnessing the Holi Festival, and adulthood in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, in a milieu that included Andy Warhol, Merce Cunningham, and fellow Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko. To make his paintings, which range from intimate to grand, Bhavsar sifts powdered pigments onto canvas, allowing air currents and his own breath and body movements to determine where they fall, creating smoky, layered compositions. “I think I have tried to convey how to free oneself,” he describes. “Using color as a force to reach towards the beauty and generosity of the material that allows you unlimited expression.”
Indian, b. 1934, Gujarat, India, based in New York, New York
Courtesy of artsy.net