Tim Hawkinson was born
in San Francisco, California in 1960. A graduate of San Jose State
University, he later earned his MFA at the University of California,
Los Angeles in 1989. Hawkinson is renowned for creating complex
sculptural systems through surprisingly simple means. His
installation
“Überorgan”—a stadium-size, fully automated
bagpipe—was pieced together from bits of electrical hardware
and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. Hawkinson’s
fascination with music and notation can also be seen in “Pentecost,”
a work in which the artist tuned cardboard tubes and assembled them
in the shape of a giant tree. On this tree the artist placed twelve
life-size robotic replicas of himself, and programmed them to beat
out religious hymns at humorously irregular intervals. The source
of inspiration for many of Hawkinson’s pieces has been the
re-imagining of his own body and what it means to make a self-portrait
of this new or fictionalized body. In 1997 the artist created an
exacting, two-inch tall skeleton of a bird from his own fingernail
parings, and later made a feather and egg from his own hair. Believable
even at a close distance, these works reveal Hawkinson’s attention
to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and the passage
of time. Hawkinson has participated in numerous exhibitions in the
United States and abroad, including the Venice Biennale (1999),
the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, (2000), the Power
Plant in Toronto, Canada (2000), the Whitney Biennial (2002), and
the 2003 Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C. Tim Hawkinson resides
in Los Angeles with his wife.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
PaceWildenstein, New York | Ace Gallery, Los Angeles |
