Tom Burr
Tuesday October 5th 6-7pm
Public Lecture, Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, NGS, The Mound
All welcome, free admission
Tom Burr‚s [1963, New Haven, Connecticut] work is based primarily in sculpture but his practice extends to writing, collage, installation and photography. Often emerging out of a dynamic between the materiality and ephemerality of objects, his individual works have become characters in an accumulative practice which began in the early 1990's.
His work revisits the formal vocabulary of the avant-gardes of the 1960s, 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 the 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. Burr uses the appropriationist strategy of the 1980s, as it permits past works to be revisited in order to reveal different significations. Thus he reconfigures a history no longer fixed in time and space, but on the contrary perfectly open, illuminating and transforming the present.
Burr received a BFA from School of Visual Arts in 1986, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1987-1988. His work has been exhibited widely with solo shows in the United States and Europe including The Whitney Museum of American Art; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Galerie Almine Rech, Paris; Secession, Vienna; American Fine Arts, Co, New York; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, and the Sculpture Center, New York. In 2006, Extrospective, a mid-career survey of his work was mounted at the Musee des Beaux Arts, in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2009 a two person exhibition, with Monica Bonvicini, travelled from the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich, to the Museum fur Gegenwartkunst, in Basel. Burr‚s writings have been published in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, October magazine, among others. He is represented by Bortolami Gallery in New York and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Burr was appointed critic in sculpture at Yale in 2009. He lives and works in Norfolk, Connecticut and New York City.
Tom Burr is Artist in Residence at Randolph Cliff, supported by the Edinburgh College of Art and the National Galleries of Scotland.
Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
