Tom Burr

Tom Burr (born in 1963, in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American artist whose work—photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations—revisits the formal vocabulary of the avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, in particular Minimalism and post-Minimalism, and mixes together pop iconography, homosexual culture, underground aesthetics, musical, cinematographic, and literary influences, as well as contemporary architecture and design. These works articulate problematics linked to architecture and public space, and questions of sociology, psychology, and gender politics. The conceptual investigation led by the artist essentially questions the way in which identity, especially sexual identity, is constructed or is, on the contrary, constrained by society and its physical spaces. The artist uses the appropriationist strategy of the 1980s, as it permits past works to be revisited in order to reveal different significations. Thus the artist reconfigures a history no longer fixed in t ime and space, but on the contrary perfectly open, and illuminating and transforming the present.

This first museum retrospective of Tom Burr’s work, this exhibition permits us to grasp the variety and scope of the artist’s explorations since 1994, by assembling about 50 works, some of which especially conceived for the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Realized in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition, entitled Tom Burr. Extrospective: Works 1994–2006, sheds light on different facets of his work while at the same time allowing new readings. Among the exhibited works, those most representative of the artist are notably Black Box (1998), which addresses notions of mise-en-scène and theatricality; Deep Purple, 2002, a replicate in wood, and at two-thirds of the original’s size, of Richard Serra’s famous sculpture Tilted Arc (1981); Split, 2005, a work between public and private space, as well as Abstract Lausanne/Lausanne Abstrait I & II and Burrville, 2006, two installations and a new series of photogr aphs through which the artist questions the idea of biography.

Catalogue The exhibition is accompanied by the first monograph on the artist, published in a bilingual edition (French/English) of 160 pages by JRP|Ringier, Zurich. This publication will include contributions by Yves Aupetitallot, George Baker, Stuart Comer, Florence Derieux and Cerith Wyn Evans as well as an interview with Tom Burr. It will form the subject of a public presentation on Friday 16 June 2006 at 6.30 pm in the presence of the artist. ISBN 3-905701-82-0.

Pressetext

Tom Burr
Extrospective: Works 1994-2006
Kurator: Florence Derieux