Artist Conversation: Dr. Valerie Hillings and Natvar Bhavsar

Join NCMA director Dr. Valerie Hillings and contemporary artist Natvar Bhasvar for a conversation about his work and life.

Natvar Bhavsar (born 1934) is a contemporary American artist of Indian origin. He lives and works in New York City. 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 1970s in a milieu that included fellow abstract expressionists Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and 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, which creates layered compositions.

Photo: Janet Brosious Bhavsar