Artist's Talk

About

Jean-Marc Bustamante in conversation with Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain. 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 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. 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 Leeds in April. Booking is recommended for all talks. To book your place call 0131 226 8181 or email bookshop@fruitmarket.co.uk