Natvar Bhavsar

Biography from the artist’s website:

Natvar Bhavsar (b. 1934) is a contemporary American artist of Indian origin. He lives and works in SoHo, New York. Colors are his medium, 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 fellow Abstract Expressionists like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Ray Parker. 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 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.”