The Fruitmarket Gallery Opens Jean-Marc Bustamante Dead Calm
The Fruitmarket Gallery presents Jean-Marc Bustamante: Dead Calm on view through 3 April, 2011.
Jean-Marc Bustamante is one of France’s senior artists and a major figure in the international art world. His clear, direct vision manifests itself in an almost bewildering array of materials and media – first photography, then sculpture, painting, architectural projects, 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.
Bustamante’s art has not been seen enough in Britain, and we are delighted to bring it to new audiences in Scotland. This exhibition includes classic work from the 1980s and 1990s – the large-scale photographs and sculptures with which Bustamante made his name and newer work from 2000 on, in particular a series of paintings on Plexiglas made especially for The Fruitmarket Gallery and completed in 2010. We are pleased to be able to show so many major works by this internationally significant artist, and to present our audience with the opportunity to track the development and continued reinvention of Bustamante’s ideas and artistic language. Though sitting outside recognisable trends in recent art, Bustamante’s work has a formal and conceptual contemporaneity, a freshness, that makes it utterly relevant to the way art is made and looked at now.
This exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. A complementary and overlapping exhibition of the work of Jean-Marc Bustamante will be shown at the Henry Moore Institute in April.
Jean-Marc Bustamante (born 1952) is a senior French artist working in sculpture and photography. After assisting the photographer and film-maker, William Klein, in the late 1970s, Bustamante became known for his own photography, in particular his monumental Tableaux series which blurred the boundary between photography and sculpture. From 1983–87, he and sculptor Bernard Bazile worked collaboratively as BazileBustamante. His most recent works on Plexiglas expand his practice further, offering a new approach to painting. Bustamante represented France in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, and his work was included in Documenta VIII in 1987, Documenta IX in 1992 and Documenta X in 1997. Im 2008 he was awarded the medal of the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. He teaches at the L’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts (ENSBA) in Paris.
The Fruitmarket Gallery is a publicly-funded art gallery of national and international significance, which aims to make contemporary art accessible without compromising art or underestimating audiences.
The Gallery presents world-class, thought-provoking and challenging art made by both Scottish and international artists in an environment that is welcoming, engaging, informative and always free. The Gallery aims to give audiences the confidence to enjoy contemporary art and to understand the importance of art, artists, culture and creativity, and their impact on individual and collective lives.
Image: Jean-Marc Bustamante, Untitled, 2010. Ink on Plexiglas, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.
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