Tim Bavington's Artistic Pipe Dream

For over ten years, the City of Las Vegas has been working toward the grand opening of the Smith Center for the Performing Arts. With over 2,600 construction workers overseeing its development, the approximately $425 million venue will be a cultural focal point for both its sponsoring city and the state of Nevada. In consulting more than twenty-five designers and architects, the lead design team placed great emphasis on promoting creative integrity and innovation within the public space. Upon being approached to create a mural for the venue's Symphony Park, Mark Moore Gallery artist TIM BAVINGTON instead proposed a major site-specific sculpture derived from American classical composer Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."

As a seminal practicing artist in the city, Bavington's first major sculptural work bespeaks his longstanding relationship to Las Vegas. Titled "Pipe Dream (Fanfare for the Common Man)," the unique work translates the artist's renown canvases into a three-dimensional composition. Spanning eighty-six feet long and twenty-seven feet tall, a carefully fabricated selection of 128 steel pipes accompany an indoor painting - titled "Fanfare (for the Common Man)" (2012). Both artworks reference the bold palette of the Vegas strip as well as its sensational mood, while also acting as a homage to the great tradition of the American symphony.

London-born painter Tim Bavington is at the forefront of a resurgence of abstract art in the American west. Since the age of eighteen he has made his home there, first in Pasadena, California where he attended the Art Center College of Art and Design and later in Las Vegas, where he received an MFA degree from the University of Nevada. At UNLV Bavington studied with art critic and curator, Dave Hickey and in 1997 he began making pictures with spray painted stripes in high-keyed colors of acrylic paint in what was to become his signature style of hazy hard-edged abstraction.

Source: www.markmooregallery.com