Tom Burr

This witty exhibition catalogue collects Burr’s recent installation at the Vienna Secession. Sculptural and collaged works create an assemblage that oscillates between interior architectural elements, catwalk and abstract form. The titles of the works and the objects themselves refer to personalities like Jean Cocteau and Truman Capote.

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 of the 1960s, in particular Minimalism and post-Minimalism, and mixes together pop iconography, homosexual culture, underground aesthetics, musical, cinematographic and literary influences and 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. 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 time and space, but on the contrary perfectly open, illuminating and transforming the present.