Tom burr artist biography

Tom Burr is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation.
Tom Burr is an American conceptual artist based in New York.
Born 1963, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Lives and works in New York, NY, USA. Selected Press Talk Art, Tom Burr in conversation with Russell Tovey and Robert.

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Volume 2

BO

One word that I think of regarding your work is brutal. It operates figuratively in relation to hard edges and blunt designs but also points towards certain biographic details: namely, New Haven, your hometown, and the brutalist architecture that you grew up around. What is the through line there?

TB

I’m trying to think of the first time that I might have thought about brutalism in relationship to my artwork. I grew up in the late 1960s and early ’70s when there was a lot of brutalist architecture built or being built. Specifically, in New Haven and New York, it was prevalent. What I found the most interesting about brutalism was the extreme controversy—it was the first moment I realized that not everybody aligned themselves with the same kind of architecture. I had a sense that there was an underlying politics involved.

Brutalism gave me a way to think a bit about what minimalism might have meant and might still mean into the 1980s and the ’90s and what these reverberations meant in relationship to constructions of power, issues of beauty, and configurations of

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Born 1963, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA.

Selected Press

Talk Art, Tom Burr in conversation with Russell Tovey and Robert Diament, 17 February 2023
November, Tom Burr in conversation with Blake Oetting, No. 39, Volume 2, February 2022
Frieze, Tom Burr: Nine Renovations, 24 April 2022
Modern Matter, I ASK MYSELF by TOM BURR, Tom Burr, March 2021
Artforum, Tom Burr, Julian Elias Bronner, 3 February 2017
Arena Homme +, Tom Burr Meets Marcel Breuer/New Heaven, Andrew Durbin, Summer/Autumn 2017

Education

1987

Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY, USA

1986

School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA

Residencies/ Teaching

2010

Artist in Residence, Randolph Cliff, Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, UK

2009

Critic in Sculpture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Solo Exhibitions

2023

Tom Burr, Bortolami, New York, NY

2022

Compressions, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Germany
detention/suspension/expulsion, Maureen Paley: St

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Tom Burr is here in conversation with himself; for a project due to show in Milan in March, before its perpetual postponement, the artist set to questioning himself, producing an interview in which he plays both parts. As memory work, the piece is reflective of Burr’s interest in temporality and subjectivity. The transcript marks a moment that never happened, irrevocably intertwined with Pasolini’s screenplay for a film that was never made.

Now rendered in print, the piece has become a work in its own right, both preceding and replacing the show. For Burr, Modern Matter has become a curatorial platform: an unofficial catalogue, exhibition space, and site for art production.

Your own biography is a theme in your work. A couple of years ago in New Haven, the city where you grew up, you took over the ground floor of a vacant Marcel Breuer building. Throughout that project, and much of your work in general, there is a preoccupation with yourself, using aspects of yourself or your biography. Do you think this preoccupation ever runs the risk of sentimentality, or even