Aicon is delighted to present Natvar Bhavsar Part III, a solo exhibition of early works by the eponymous seasoned New York artist. The show marks the third chapter in the ongoing story of Bhavsar being told at the gallery. It picks up two years after the previous exhibition, Sublime Light, and includes fourteen paintings created between 1987 and 2005.

His paintings evince influences from his childhood in India—surrounded by vivid textiles, practicing rangoli, and witnessing the Holi Festival—and his adulthood in New York. Cater Ratcliff opines on Bhavsar’s use of color:

“The color’s values are those of variety, subtlety and intensity; it has the capacity to draw out, to expand and deepen, perceptual experience. Bhavsar’s works uniquely and extraordinarily invite an uninterrupted flow of perception, inflicting so subtly and focusing it so intensely that looking finally becomes its own purpose.” 

The canvases in the present exhibition represent a move away from the cubist blocks of the 1960s and vertical flashes of the 1970s toward an exploration of color fields and the universality of color. In the artist’s own words, “Every time I look at a painting, what invites me to get absorbed is the experience of color.”

The billowing cloud-like areas in AASO and ADREE, whose surfaces are striated like mountainous ranges seen from outer space, are a new direction for the artist in this period. The formal structures of the early years have been eradicated to give way to a much more inclusive, expansive, and dramatic composition, which Bhavsar continues to explore and paint today.