Tom Burr
Palm Beach Picture, 1999/2000
€ 1,400
OrderTom Burr’s black-and-white edition Palm Beach Picture (1999/2000) shows an outtake from his eight-part photographic series Palm Beach Views from 1999. The latter was part of his solo exhibition Low Slung at Kunstverein Braunschweig 25 years ago and was originally produced for an exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, titled “Private Property: anti-public sculpture.” The photographs illustrate exactly what the title suggests: private property, rendered opaque by manicured hedges that, in their block-like, minimalist rigidity, demonstratively turn against the public. Separating “the pedestrian from the lounger in the garden chair” (as Burr writes in the Low Slung exhibition catalogue, also available at Kunstverein), these “garden walls” mark his interest in both physical and metaphorical thresholds between private and public space.
In Palm Beach Picture, however, the hedges are only barely discernible. Apparently taken in a spontaneous upward tilt of the camera, the image directs the viewer’s gaze toward the sky from a low-angle perspective. The central visual element is a palm tree, heavy with ripe fruit, which—together with the cropped view of a rooftop and the obligatory U.S. flag—conjures a sense of abundance and uninhibited freedom, untouched by whatever may be happening beyond the hedges.