TOM BURR

Maureen Paley is pleased to present the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Tom Burr—Stages. For almost three decades, Tom Burr’s sculpture, writing, collage, and photography have tended to focus on access, site-specificity, the confluence of public and private environments, as well as the constructed persona.

Some notes:

And what of the use of the word ‘stage’, as a place within the progression of a disease. Can a social body be diagnosed in this way? Or a structure, like Marcel Breuer’s Armstrong Rubber building in New Haven - with its warehouse section amputated in an act not of preservation or of saving (the body from the infected limb) but as a slow removal of the whole? What of the removal of portions of populations, Red Scares, bar raids, holding pens and witch hunts? What stage are we at?

The platforms shown in this exhibition are meant to reference Robert Smithson’s concept of the ‘non-site’. They have a dialectical relationship to the Breuer building as a situation and an extension of the ‘body / building’ model I am working through.

The three platforms are related to one another. Like much of my collage work they oscillate between image and formal material arrangements.

Tom Burr 2017

Tom Burr was born in 1963, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He currently lives and works in New York, NY, USA. Selected solo exhibitions include Tom Burr/New Haven: Phase One: Pre-Existing Conditions, New Haven, Connecticut at the Breuer Armstrong Rubber building (a year long project as part of Bortolami Gallery’s ‘Artist/City’ initiative); Surplus of Myself, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany, 2017; Grips, Dressage, Parcours, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2013; Addict — Love, Sculpture Center, New York, 2008; Gone, Gone, American Fine Arts, New York, 2003; Deep Purple, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002. Selected group exhibitions include Sculpture Projects Münster 2017, Münster, Germany, 2017; Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Béton, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria in 2016; To expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2015 and Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2014.