About Artwork

Tom Burr’s Brutal Fragment (New Haven) refers to the artist’s continued practice of affixing once-modular signifiers – here images of Jim Morrison alongside with Paul Rudolph-designed Brutalist architecture – a process which extrapolates and interpolates upon Burr’s sense, and recollection, of autobiography. Burr has said of the incorporation of Brutalism into what had become the de facto appearance of civic institutionalization and its erotic charge, “I was interested in that contradiction; the latent adolescent rebellion of Brutalism”. This print frames and reproduces a discrete selection – or fragment – of a 2001 work Brutalist Bulletin Board: itself ​an important and early work of Burr’s ‘bulletin boards’.