Tim Bavington’s Rock-Themed Art a Hit With U.S. Collectors

NEW YORK—British painter Tim Bavington (b. 1966) is already well known in Britain and Europe, but recently his work has found a growing U.S. audience as well. Last fall, an exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, of 12 large (6-by-6-foot) paintings priced at $12,000/40,000 each, resulted in the sale of six works to a mix of U.S. and European private buyers and one U.S. museum, according to the gallery.

In “Decade,” Bavington’s recent show at the Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles (April 24–May 29), the artist showed works on paper (priced at $5,000/6,000) and painted canvases (priced at $9,000/27,500). Seven works in the show have been sold to date, all to private collectors on the West Coast, according to gallery director Catlin Moore.

This is Bavington’s fifth exhibition at Mark Moore since 2000, and prices for the artist’s work ?have jumped fivefold over the past decade, according to Catlin Moore. “He is able to put together a body of work regularly and quickly, and demand is so high,” she told ARTnewsletter.

Bavington’s work, which alludes to rock and psychedelic music, attracts a relatively young audience of collectors who “are interested in color field painting and geometric abstraction,” said Katie Rashid, director of the Jack Shainman Gallery. One 32-by-32-inch acrylic on canvas in the Mark Moore exhibition is titled Soul Kitchen; a 44-by-88-inch acrylic is called The End. Both are named for songs by The Doors. Another, 89-by-63-inch painting is titled Jump (after a Van Halen song).

Among the works on paper in the Mark Moore exhibition are three pastels priced at $5,000 apiece. Three acrylic on paper paintings are $6,000 each. At times, Bavington produces inkjet prints of his images, which range in price from $4,000/11,000 depending upon size, as well as multi-panel canvases—one of those works, the 18-panel Columbia, 2008, extends more than 40 feet in length and was priced at $125,000 in a 2008 exhibition at the gallery. (That one did not sell.)

Sales of Bavington’s work occur infrequently in the secondary market, both gallery directors report, adding there have been no paintings put up for sale at auction.