Tim Bavington, ’99 MFA, is a guy who knows how to turn 40. Just a few months before his May milestone, he reached a height that most artists only dream of: having a painting bought by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.
That’s a sure way to avert a midlife career crisis. The England-born, Las Vegas-based artist, the self-described “kid in the back of the classroom who was never supposed to amount to anything,” has indeed amounted to something.
Showings of his abstract art — vibrant, vibrating, vertically striped paintings with rock ’n’ roll titles — had already been wowing gallery-goers and art buyers from San Francisco to Paris over the past couple of years. Bavingtons have landed in some of the top collections in America (from Steve Wynn’s to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art), they’ve hung next to the likes of Mark Rothko (at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.), and they’ve started selling well into five figures.
But it was a painting called “Physical S.E.X.” bought by MoMA during last fall’s solo exhibit in New York City’s Jack Shainman Gallery that really rocked his world. “MoMA is the top of the mountain,” Bavington says. “It’s serious business to get in there.”
“It’s a rigorous process,” says Bavington’s chief mentor, Dave Hickey, a nationally renowned art critic and UNLV English professor. “I have had friends who have been great painters their whole lives and not gotten in.”
MoMA doesn’t categorize by region, but it’s believed that Bavington is only the second Nevadan — Michael Heizer being the other — to have a work in the world-renowned collection, which goes back more than a century to Cezanne and the origins of Modernism.
Boosting the Reputation of UNLV’s Theory Refugees
There are several layers of significance to all this, from the price of his paintings now flirting with six figures to the confirmation that he’s contributed to the vernacular of abstract art. But the chief meaning boils down to this, Hickey says: “He’s no longer a young artist. He’s an absolutely established American artist.”
In 1993, when Bavington moved his freelance career — namely illustrating The Simpsons for merchandise related to the TV series — from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Hickey recruited him to join UNLV’s graduate studio. Bavington joined a class in the mid-’90s that sparked an impressive run of successes by Master of Fine Arts students.
Hickey called them the “Theory Refugees,” and UNLV was their place of asylum, an environment free of entrenched art-school ideologies.
Bavington marvels at the success rate of the dozen or so MFAs in his class — those who went on to make a living as artists, including Yek Wong. “It would have to rival that of any of the major art colleges,” he says. Bavington’s MoMA achievement just raised UNLV’s stock again. “When one artist does good, it’s good for the whole group,” says Hickey, who wrote an essay for a new catalog (published by Steidl) surveying Bavington’s paintings back to his seminal work.
That style developed during the MFA days, in 1997, when after exhaustive experiments in abstract art, Bavington landed on spray-painted stripes, inspired by geometric-abstract masters Gene Davis and Bridget Riley. He then explored different theories of organizing those stripes, from intuition and chance to architectural systems and information bar codes.
“At the time,” Bavington says, “it seemed like it was good enough to get a degree.”
Those early works weren’t “as electric, as luminescent” as those today, says Mary Warner, who along with Hickey and her fellow associate professor of art, Pasha Rafat, served on Bavington’s graduate committee. But she could see that “he was on to something.” As his technique evolved, the colors began to look “as if they were light rather than paint.”
‘A Slippery Step Away from Chaos’
Bavington’s breakthrough occurred around 2002, when he began applying “theories of proportional harmony” to his work. While he’d always used mathematics to come up with his proportions, music was now the catalyst. He takes a musical riff or a guitar solo — such as with “Physical S.E.X.,” a song by The Darkness — and matches the 12-tone musical scale with the 12- hue color wheel, assigning colors to notes. With a spray gun, he applies the stripes accordingly, skillfully blending and bleeding them to achieve a visual vibration.
This is not about capturing music with paint, nor the “spirit of rock ’n’ roll.” That his paintings are based on rock songs is merely a musical preference. Mozart could be converted into cool, colorful stripes just as well — “maybe even better,” Bavington says.
Unlike music, his stripes come without a narrative; there’s no true beginning or end. Viewing a Bavington is up to the individual. And that demand for participation, especially when mentally nudged by those rock ’n’ roll titles, makes for some interesting interpretations of his work, which the artist labels as “a nice balance between pop art and expressionism.”
L.A. Times critic David Pagel wrote, “Art historians often talk about Pollock in terms of jazz improvisation. Bavington makes you see how rock ’n’ roll his paintings are: tough, delicate, and one slippery step away from chaos.”
The artist’s chosen work environment often dilates the eye of the beholder, too: “I think of Tim Bavington as a kind of bartender,” wrote Christopher Miles in Artforum (November 2002). “Trained in Las Vegas, America’s speakeasy for broad definitions of aesthetic activity, he serves up exotic cocktails on canvas.”
Hickey, who once described the stripes as “neon in the mist,” believes Las Vegas does indeed have a proper role in the context. If nothing else, the city offers a blank canvas that’s not adulterated by the outside “Art World.” And Bavington nicely backs up that notion, proving that an artist can hit the jackpot from Vegas — perhaps working here even improves the odds.
That might also help Bavington deal with success, now that it’s here. He’s used to the freedom the city offers, and perhaps the most valuable prize that MoMA offers an artist is simply more of it.
Not that the weird art kid in the back of the classroom needs any place or thing in particular to ground him. “Tim’s a serious artist,” Hickey says, “but he doesn’t take himself seriously.”
Bavington’s handling of his MoMA momentum is that attitude on display. “Now, do I get paralyzed when I go into the studio from the weight of my work being given such historic designation?” he says. “My feeling is, it’s just art and there’s nothing to be afraid of. There’s risk involved but it’s not going to kill anyone. I can go into the studio and be just as irresponsible as the first time I went into the UNLV studio.”
