Tom Burr

Last updated
Tom Burr
Born1963 (age 6162)
New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Known forConcept art

Tom Burr (born 1963) is an American conceptual artist. Burr's artwork explores the relationships between, "the built environment, subjectivity, and historical persona". [1] He is based in New York City.

Contents

Life

Burr was born in 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut. [2] Burr attended the Educational Center for the Arts high school, a multi-arts program taught in part by Yale University graduate students. [3] It is here that Burr became aware of and developed an interest in Minimal and post-Minimalist artists, including Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Eva Hesse and Gordon Matta Clark. Burr's senior thesis work reflected these influences, by merging sculptural elements with brief poetic texts. Simultaneously, Burr’s collage based work began at this time.

After graduating from high school, Burr moved to New York City in 1982 [4] to attend figure drawing classes at the Art Students League of New York. Followed by further study, Burr attended the School of Visual Arts (SVA) from 1982 until 1986 and the Whitney Independent Study Program from 1987 to 1988, where he studied with Craig Owens, Benjamin Buchloh, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Kruger, and Ull Hohn. During this time Burr immersed himself in the theoretical writings and conceptual practices that would expand his own work and thinking. While at the Whitney Program in 1988 Burr met art dealer Colin de Land and began a friendship that would lead to Burr joining de Land's seminal gallery, American Fine Arts, Co. in the early 1990s. [4]

In the late 1990s Burr embarked on a body of work that remains ongoing; derived from the language and forms of both Tony Smith's sculptures, on the one hand, and closed architectural spaces such as bars, cages and boxes. These works, often borrowing Smith's matte black palette, evoke spaces of control and containment, as well as the "safe zones" of underground cultures, such as gay male culture. [5] Alongside these works, Burr developed his now iconic Bulletin Boards, originally created out of the excessive collecting of images and materials that are part of his working methods. Constructed through plays of juxtaposition, the boards are markers of place, often reflecting the situation of their exhibition.

His work was included in the Whitney Biennial 2004 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. [6] Burr also participated in the 12th Istanbul Biennial in 2011 [7] and at the Cruising Pavilion exhibition in the context of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2018. [8]

Burrs work is found in many public art collections including: Hammer Museum, [9] [10] Whitney Museum of American Art, [6] Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, [11] Walker Art Center, [12] and many others.

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biennale</span> Event occurring every two years

In the art world, a biennale, is a large-scale international contemporary art exhibition. The term was popularised by the Venice Biennale, which was first held in 1895, but the concept of such a large scale, and intentionally international event goes back to at least the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. The 1990s saw the boom of art biennials, a period of multiplication of this exhibition form during which art biennials grew from approximately five to over 250 internationally.

The São Paulo Art Biennial was founded in 1951 and has been held every two years since. It is the second oldest art biennial in the world after the Venice Biennale, which serves as its role model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hito Steyerl</span> German filmmaker (born 1966)

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has been a professor of Current Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2024. Until 2024, she was a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sislej Xhafa</span> Kosovan artist

Sislej Xhafa is a Kosovar contemporary artist, based in New York.

Olivia Plender is an artist based in London and Stockholm. She is known for her installations, performances, videos, and comics.

Charles Esche is a museum director, curator and writer. His focus is on art and how it reflects, provokes and influences changes in society. He lives between Edinburgh and Eindhoven.

Ahmet Öğüt is a conceptual artist living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Berlin, Germany. He works with a broad range of media including video, photography, installation, drawing and printed media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gastón Ugalde</span> Bolivian artist, painter, photographer and sculptor (1944–2023)

Gastón Ugalde is considered the father of contemporary bolivian art and was the recipient of the prestigious Konex Award in 2002 along with Oscar Niemeyer. Ugalde was named "the most important living Bolivian artist" by the Konex Foundation in Argentina and was also referred to as the "Andean Warhol" by art critics. Ugalde was also known as "the enfant terrible" of the Bolivian Art Scene.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Olivier Mosset</span> Swiss visual artist

Olivier Mosset is a Swiss visual artist. He lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galit Eilat</span>

Galit Eilat in Israel, is an independent curator and writer living in the Netherlands.

Cevdet Erek is a Turkish visual artist and musician living and working in Istanbul, Turkey. He is known for combining sound, rhythm and architecture to create installations, videos, objects and performances characterized by site specificity. Cevdet Erek was the recipient of the Nam Jun Paik Award in 2012 and represented Turkey at the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia in 2017.

Latifa Echakhch is a Moroccan-French visual artist. Working in Switzerland, she creates installations. She participated in the Venice Biennale in 2011 and won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2013.

Joseph Grigely is an American visual artist and scholar. His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms including sculpture, video, and installations. Grigely was included in two Whitney Biennials, and is also a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Agnieszka Kurant is a Polish interdisciplinary conceptual artist. She examines how economic, social, and cultural systems work in ways that blur the lines between reality and fiction.

Adrián Villar Rojas is an Argentinian sculptor known for his elaborate fantastical works which explore notions of the Anthropocene and the end of the world. In his dream like installations he uses aspects of drawing, sculpture, video and music to create immersive situations in which the spectator is confronted with ideas and images of their imminent extinction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ana Prvacki</span> Serbian-born artist (born 1976)

Ana Prvački The practice of artist Ana Prvački draws inspiration from close observation of nature and contemporary culture. Her interdisciplinary approach encompasses video, augmented reality, sculpture, painting and immersive performances.

Banu Cennetoğlu is a visual artist based in Istanbul. She uses photography, installation, and printed matter to explore the classification, appropriation and distribution of data and knowledge. Her work deals with listings, collections, rearrangements, and archives. Cennetoğlu co-represented Turkey at the 53rd International Venice Biennale with Ahmet Öğüt in 2009. Her work has been shown at numerous international institutions such as Musée cantonal des Beaux-arts, Lausanne (2022); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2020); Ständehaus, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfallen, Düsseldorf (2019); SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); documenta14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2011); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); Walker Art Center (2007); Istanbul Biennial (2007); and Berlin Biennial (2003). She is the founding director of BAS (2006–ongoing), an Istanbul-based artist-run initiative that collects and displays artists’ books and printed material as artwork. In Turkey, she is "best known as an apostle of the artist’s book."

Carolina Caycedo is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish pavilion</span>

The Spanish pavilion houses Spain's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.

Larry Johnson (b.1959) is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles. Johnson’s humorous and often cutting commentaries on his own culture’s exported ideologies have made him one of the foremost artists of his generation.

References

  1. Ruiz, Alan (2015-12-15). "Interview: Tom Burr by Alan Ruiz". BOMB Magazine. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  2. "Tom Burr | Take It or Leave It digital archive". Hammer Museum. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  3. "Tom Burr | Artist Profile, Exhibitions & Artworks". Ocula. 2019-10-01. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  4. 1 2 "Tom Burr". Interview Magazine. 2016-12-14. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  5. Meyer, James. "Tom Burr". Frieze. No. 27. ISSN   0962-0672 . Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  6. 1 2 "Tom Burr". whitney.org. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  7. "12th Istanbul Biennial". bienal.iksv.org. Retrieved 2025-01-22.
  8. "Cruising Pavilion: Cuestionando el manifiesto de la Bienal de Venecia 2018 desde los espacios ilegítimos". ArchDaily México (in Mexican Spanish). 2018-06-06. Retrieved 2025-01-22.
  9. "Propped Perfume | Tom Burr | Take It or Leave It digital archive". Hammer Museum. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  10. "Single Partition Pla... | Tom Burr | Take It or Leave It digital archive". Hammer Museum. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  11. "Bush Laid Bare". Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  12. "His Personal Effects (White)". walkerart.org. Retrieved 2019-10-01.