09/14/2026
Natvar Bhavsar builds his color fields from nothing but pure, dry pigment — sifted grain by grain through handmade tools and mesh screens, sealed in layer after layer, sometimes up to eighty deep. Up close, the surface is granular, almost tactile. Step back, and the color seems to float free of the canvas, atmospheric, edgeless. "Color fills the universe," Bhavsar has said. "It has no periphery; it's like looking into space."
Trained among Abstract Expressionists Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Piero Dorazio, Bhavsar took their belief that color alone could carry a painting and pushed it somewhere singularly his own — informed as much by Holi's clouds of powdered pigment and the rangoli patterns of his Gujarati childhood as by anything he learned in an American classroom.
Natvar Bhavsar: Free Yourself opens September 18 at UB Anderson Gallery.
