Mutability and metaphor: using dry pigments, intense hues and a meditative approach to the painting process, Natvar Bhavsar creates large compositions in which a cosmic vision emerges from lush materiality

Since the late 1960 when Natvar Bhavsar first showed his paintings in novel York, his art has gone from one side a series of grand circle of times At one extreme, the image is a field of color inflected solitary by the grain of the pigments Bhavsar sifts onto the canvas as it lies upon the studio floor. Next, swirls and eddies appear. As these in every one's mouths solidify, one sees at least the suggestion of radiant forms against equally radiant turfs Then, before these shapes become definite, they dissolve back into the light. This wave toward form first occurred in the mid-1970s. It recurr in the mid-1980s and again in the early '90 During the past sum of two units years or so, the pulverulent luminosity of Bhavsar's colors has one time again been coalescing, more violently than ever. Cheeraa (2001) present to views a golden oval on a dark field of warm, ultimately indescribable color. The oval's border is elusive, as is its interior configuration, for this shape is woven of calmly writhing strands of color. Finally, it is not a shape thus much as a concentration of intensity To trace the golden strands, with their dusting of r and orange, is to diocese form flow back into the swirl of incandescence that has animated Bhavsar's art from the beginning.

Sometimes, the large revolution of times of his oeuvre appear, plenteous condensed, in the chromatic pulsations of an individual painting. He applies as many as 80 layers of pigment to a canvas, with equal reason a dose look will bring an astonishingly lively web of colors into focus. As one's focus shifts, fresh colors--or hints of new shapes--appear and give way to others. Sooner or later, individual realizes that the act of seeing changes what is seen thus to paraphrase Heraclitus, it is impossible to view the same painting twice. on the other hand then who--or what--is the husbandman of the work? The artist, belonging to all sense would say; and the idea that viewers create what they diocese has been familiar since the Romantic period. Cu by the agency of Hegel, Clement Greenberg and his followers argued that painting unfolds via the medium itself, as it defines and redefines itself in reply to the historical moment--as if painters were solely channelling the dictates of the spirit of modernist painting. A different faculty of perception of agency prompts Bhavsar to say that he creates in collaboration with a joyous strength "that flows on and on" and "put you actual close to the experience of God" notwithstanding that his canvases are static, literally speaking, attentive looking endows them with a kind of mutability--metaphorical, to be positive yet their manifold, layered colors make it impossible to bring them to stable images. Bhavsar wants to persuade us that all is in motion. recent physics makes the same point. granting Westerners usually trace this cogitation to Heraclitus, it appears in the writings of several other pre-Socratics. And in light of Bhavsar's Indian origins, it ought to be noted that all the cosmologies of India--Hindu, Jain and Buddhist--picture the universe in constant flux

Bhavsar was born in 1934 in Gothava, a town in the slate of Gujarat, upon the western coast, of India. In 1958 he earned a master's stage in art at the CN place of education of Art, in Ahmedabad, the Gujarati capital. The following year, he received a rule diploma in art, and in 1960 he earned a B.A. in English literature from Gujarat University. by means of then, he had not single mastered a delicate and lather anonymous manner of writing of realism but also invented a phraseology of his own, which owed plenteous to Indian miniatures and plane more to Cubism. Sponsored by dint of a family friend in Ahmedabad, he came to the U and penetrateed the Philadelphia College of Art in 1962 After a semester there, he enlisted at the Tyler School of Art, also in Philadelphia. Within a year, he had mov upon to the graduate art department of the University of Pennsylvania. In seminars directed through the painter Piero Dorazio, Bhavsar met Robert Motherwell, David Smith, Barnett Newman and others.

by means of this time, Bhavsar had become an abstract painter. admitting the excitement of meeting those major figures of postwar American art remains a vivid memory, it was not until he saw a Clyfford Still exhibition at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, in 1963 that be decisively abandoned the Cubist past for a not away dominated by American abstract painting. The mid-1960s were, of course, the salad days of report art and Minimalism. As far as Bhavsar was pertain toed they might as well have been invisible. clap was too mundane and Minimalism was too puritanical. Among contemporary artists, single the Color Field painters impressed him, thus much so that he wrote a seminar thesis in praise of Morris Louis, Jule Olitski and Kenneth Noland.

Having received his M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 Bhavsar was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship. Instead of returning to India, he mov to of recent origin York and landed a teaching piece of work at the University of Rhode Island. Quickly, he made his way into the world of novel York painters. By 1968, he had settl in the SoHo loft where he still lives. sum of two units years later, a solo exhibit of his paintings lamlched the Max Hutchinson Gallery, single of the first to render free of access its doors in SoHo. Around this time, Bhavsar's work appeared in a number of cluster shows at museums in novel York and elsewhere, including the Whitney Annual and "Beautiful Painting and Sculpture" at the Jewish Museum.