This month we will be looking at the work of Jean-Marc Bustamante, one of France’s senior artists and a major figure in the international art world.
Bustamante received critical acclaim with his contribution to the French pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003. A key theme in his work is a linking of what Uta Grosenick has called the abstract space of the mind with the real space of nature and architecture. Though sitting outside recognisable trends in recent art, Bustamante’s work has a formal and conceptual contemporaneity, a freshness, that makes it relevant to the way art is made and looked at today. His clear, direct vision manifests itself in an almost bewildering array of materials and media – first photography, then sculpture, painting, architectural projects and installation. His work is unified and characterised by its calm intelligence and a kind of extraordinary ordinariness that helps us see its subject, the world around us, in a new way.
This exhibition includes classic work from the 1980s and 1990s – the large-scale photographs and sculptures with which Bustamante made his name and more recent works from 2000 onwards, in particular a series of paintings on Plexiglas made especially for The Fruitmarket Gallery and completed in 2010.
Joining us to explore how Bustamante continuously reinvents his ideas and artistic language will be Stacy Boldrick – Research and Interpretation Manager at The Fruitmarket Gallery.
