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Open by appointment only Bortolami is pleased to announce the opening of Tom Burr/New Haven, alternatively titled BODY / BUILDING, the third project of the gallery’s Artist/City programming initiative. Over the next six months, Burr will occupy and activate the first floor of the Marcel Breuer-designed office building previously occupied by the Armstrong Rubber Company and the Pirelli Tire Company, now owned by IKEA. Open by appointment only, this Brutalist masterpiece will serve as the site of an evolving exhibition, the first phase of which Burr has titled Pre-Existing Conditions. Through a consideration of the building as a body, and conversely, thinking of bodies (including his own) as a building or construction, Burr is collapsing one into the other. Located in the artist’s hometown, the Breuerdesigned building constitutes a cipher for the various social and political concerns central to Burr’s work, not to mention the artist’s own autobiography. As he explains, “I was born there a handful of years before the Pirelli Building was built, so it was always in my mind while I was growing up.” Armstrong Rubber commissioned the building in 1968 for its factory and executive offices and it became an iconic emblem as the entrance to the city off Interstate 95, particularly at a time when the city was gaining attention for its urban renewal and restructuring. The building was envisioned and constructed as a symbol of utopian urban strategy but, like many examples of Brutalism, became a representation of the failure of Modernism’s idealistic aspirations.

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